So Liesel insisted on trying to ride down the hill. And finally he said, ‘Meinetwegen.’ It means, if you must. Or, as far as I’m concerned. She pushed her bike to the top of the hill, over the ridges and up the slope, which was difficult enough – he refused to help her. If you’re old enough to ride down it, he told her, you must be strong enough to push yourself up it. Which she did, at last. Everybody was watching, all of Klaus’s friends; she couldn’t back down either. And so she climbed onto her seat and pulled her feet off the ground. She didn’t have to pedal; the hill took care of the rest. She remembers the first few seconds, gathering speed, feeling a jolt, her wheels left the ground, she was flying, really, and then she remembers lying in a heap at the bottom of the hill with a terrible pain in her knee.
At that time, which was just after the war, they didn’t have all the complicated surgeries available for knee injuries, which they do now. It swelled up and she couldn’t walk on it for a week, they kept her in bed, but eventually it got better. Years later it started hurting again – like a kind of memory, returning.
‘But I was never angry with him, I loved him too much. I wanted to be like him. And it was my fault. He was a child, too. Fourteen years old but in his own way still very young.’
Jean, who was listening, said to Susie in an undertone: ‘Does Ben know? Did you tell him?’
‘Yes, he knows.’
So she said to Ben: ‘Are you excited to have a new baby in the family? When did you find out?’
It seemed to her strange, how little they were talking about the pregnancy; Jean wanted to redress the balance. Bill was walking five paces ahead, by himself – they had turned east on 82nd Street, which was darker and quieter than Broadway, and were passing the heavily wrought, slightly greenish iron doors of a church, with wide steps. Someone was having a beer on top of the steps, sitting down and drinking from a paper bag. He looked indulgently on; there was a backpack at his feet. He had the air of someone without access to a private bathroom. After the church, there was a dry-cleaners; the shop front, with a panel over the window, hadn’t been changed in thirty years. What surprised Jean was how old-fashioned it looked, the italics of the name and then the white all caps: Fang CLEANERS DRY CLEAN * LAUNDRY * ALTERATIONS FREE PICK-UP & DELIVERY. And then a telephone number. Already it had the faintly vintage feel of sawdust and striped awnings, part of the classy past. Next to it, the blank brick wall of an apartment block was stenciled with the shadow of the fire escape, a double zigzag like a slightly distorted reflection of the real red rusty thing, which stopped short ten feet from the ground. They reached the street lamp that was casting the shadow, and the lights and noise of Amsterdam on the corner.
‘Mom told me this afternoon,’ Ben said.
‘I wanted us to have a weekend together.’ Susie was using the voice she used around her children, that was partly addressed to them and partly to everyone else. ‘Just you and me, before school starts, before everything starts.’
‘Just you and me and fifteen uncles aunts cousins grandparents …’ Jean said, apologetically.
‘He knows what I mean. Without David or William. When they’re small like that, you spend all this time alone together, and then slowly … Forces conspire.’ She put her arm around her son, who came up to her shoulder; she kissed him on the head and added, ‘To take them away.’ It worried her slightly that Jean might understand some personal reference to her situation, and so she went on: ‘We had a nice train ride into the city.’
‘I’m excited.’ Ben seemed to tolerate his mother’s affections placidly. ‘I’m more worried about William. He’ll have to get used to not being the baby anymore.’
‘Everything’s hardest on the oldest.’ Liesel had a way of not quite responding to what had been said before. Also, she was still caught up in her story. Susie noticed that more and more of her mother’s conversation took the form of recollection; it saddened her vaguely. Liesel had always told stories but now it seemed she couldn’t help herself. ‘Klaus was really a wonderful big brother,’ she said to Ben. ‘Afterwards, when he saw what had happened, he tried to carry me home. But I was too big. He had to put me down on one of the benches, and then leave me – he ran to tell our mother. One of the things he told her, which he admitted to me afterwards, is that he always used the brakes on his bike when he came down the hill. He has a real honesty streak; he has to say the worst about himself. Whenever I’m angry with him these days, and Klaus can be a difficult and irritating man, I remember that for thirty or forty feet, when I was twelve years old, he tried to carry me home.’
Bill was waiting for the lights to change. ‘What does this do to your teaching?’ he asked Susie, when the others caught up.
‘Nothing, really. I’m on an ad hoc basis anyway. This fall I’ve got a pretty full load and then nothing in the spring, and after that we’ll work it out the way we always do.’
Susie was used to the fact that her father expressed his love by worrying over practical details, and yet she couldn’t help being disappointed by how little the atmosphere had changed. It was a Sunday evening; they were walking back from a restaurant. That’s the problem with secrets, they never matter as much as you want them to. Her parents disapproved of the backseat role she had taken to David’s professional career. That much was obvious – they resented him for it, too, which wasn’t entirely fair. Because the baby was her idea, at least, it’s what she wanted, more than he wanted it … It felt to Susie like a kind of renewed ambition, a way of taking interest in life again, and starting over. That’s what she wanted to explain, but somehow the conversation never let her. It was like attempting to fit something bulky into the opening of a narrow plastic bag.
At least Jean was trying to make nice. She said to Susie, ‘Maybe at one point this weekend you can cut my hair. My fringe keeps getting in the way.’
‘You mean your bangs.’ A vague sort of tease, about becoming English; she didn’t really mean anything by it, and Jean didn’t notice.
‘I refuse to pay forty pounds at a hairdresser. There are cheaper places in my neighborhood, but mostly for Afro-Caribbeans. There’s a barbershop under the tracks by the train station, but I don’t have the guts to go in. I’ve never seen a white person in there.’
Susie suggested: ‘You could give me a five-minute backrub in return. David doesn’t see the point of them anymore. He says it’s what you do when you’re courting.’
A small admission, of something missing, to answer Jean’s appeal. But as soon as she said it, Susie heard something else, too, in her own voice, a boast about the familiarity of marriage, which Jean was in danger of underestimating. As if what Susie really meant was this: there’s a kind of superficial niceness in all these relationships that goes away. Oh who knows. When you’re sensitive to something and still a little angry or upset (because your sister is sleeping with a married man who has kids), no matter how much love or good will you also feel, it’s hard not to get hemmed in by subtext.
They were passing the Natural History Museum, walking beside the park where Jean and Susie and Ben had eaten their bagels earlier in the day. The building, lit up at night, strongly illuminated from below, looked like a court of law. There were still people on the sidewalk, a high percentage of dog-owners, taking their dogs for a bathroom break before bedtime, but the park itself was closed and under the lights seemed vaguely threatening, deserted and under surveillance. All of these civic spaces have day-selves and night-selves. ‘Maybe tomorrow morning we should actually try to go in,’ Susie said. (Another little dig?) ‘What time do we need to set out for Flushing Meadows?’
‘I’d like to get there not later than 12.30.’ Bill had thought about all of this more than anyone else.
‘I wake up at six thirty anyway.’
‘You can eat the meatballs,’ Jean joked.
‘So what does that mean? When do we have to leave the house?’
‘It’s about half an hour from Times Square.’
‘Longer than
that,’ Jean said.
‘Forty-five minutes.’
‘You have to get to Times Square first.’
‘What’s the big deal? It’s five stops on the red line.’
‘Unless we take a taxi,’ Liesel said. ‘In which case we can pick up Dana on the way.’
‘Then we need two taxis. And we get stuck in traffic.’
‘I don’t know if Dana wants to be picked up. That’s not the sense I got.’ And so on.
It was almost ten o’clock, the streetlamps and shop fronts and headlights mixed their glow. Clouds had come over the sky, rolling darkly over Central Park, which Susie could see at the end of the block – a row of trees on either side leading up to a green smudge, shapeless and shifting slightly in the wind. The temperature seemed to have skipped a step going down the stairs. End of summer feelings, rain coming, back to school. Susie had stopped entirely paying attention; she had the half-anxious, half-consoling sense that her real life was elsewhere. When she was fighting with David she sometimes thought, the people who really know me are Liesel and Bill, Jean and Paul and Nathan; but then, in their presence, David somehow became a source of protection, something held in reserve. She could talk to him about them afterwards.
Eventually, as they waited in the lobby of Michael’s building for the elevator to take them up, Bill said: ‘Paul should be asleep by now.’
‘I hate it, how public it is, what he has to go through.’ Liesel was tired, she had walked too far, it was late, and everything she felt had risen very near to the surface.
‘What is he going through?’ Bill for some reason had a reservoir of indignation on this subject, which he could dip into at will. ‘He’s playing tennis.’
Jean didn’t want to take sides. ‘He’s winning, he’s losing.’
‘I’m glad it’s almost over,’ Liesel said. ‘And he can live the rest of his life.’
‘What is that life?’ There are arguments you have with your wife that acquire new energy when you have them in front of your kids. ‘This is his life. What do you think that life is supposed to be?’
But Liesel had an answer this time. ‘He said to me, he wants to buy a house in Texas.’
‘What for?’ It was Jean now who seemed indignant. Who wanted to deny that her mother might have inside information. ‘For a couple weeks in summer, so he can take a break from New York.’
‘No, he wants to live there, he wants to move there.’
‘I can guarantee you,’ Jean said, ‘that’s not what he wants to do.’
‘He’s already talking to architects, he’s looking at land.’
‘Does Dana know? What’s Dana’s reaction to all this.’
‘I haven’t talked to her.’
‘Because it’s Dana here that you should really be worrying about in that case.’
This is how they talked, Jean and Liesel, Bill sometimes chipping in. While Susie felt more and more removed from it all – and only slightly upset, though maybe the bruise would show up later. At the restaurant they had asked her about her due date, and Liesel said something about morning sickness, which she used to suffer from, too. More stories. But the focus of their attention was clearly on Paul, at least right now, which she didn’t blame him for – even as a kid, he had the air of wanting it least. Probably the two go together. The elevator came and she stepped in. Even Ben looked tired now, though he wouldn’t admit it; while the lift rose, she took his hand but when the doors opened he let go of her again. Kids give you a few years of protection, from everything else, including your own family, your own childhood, but unless you keep making new ones the protection runs out.
MONDAY
When Paul woke up, too early, he could tell that the weather had shifted. It had rained overnight but the rain had stopped – now there was just a leftover glitter between the curtains. But he could hear the wind in the flaws of the contact between the window frame and sill, a kind of coming and going noise, which suggested to him for some reason a whistling circular motion, or somebody blowing out and in. He didn’t mind the wind so long as it didn’t rain. It sucked, waiting around for the courts to clear, everybody hanging around, Bill and Liesel, too, in the wet and cold (at least Paul could stay in the locker room), while you had to work out when to put food in your stomach. But a little wind would probably help his cause. Borisov was a heavy hitter, he had narrow margins of error. Dana wasn’t in bed.
One of the things Marcello used to tell him on game days was … let everything go. Think of yourself as a stick in a current, don’t fight it. That’s what they said about airplane turbulence, too. The stress on the system is much higher if you try to keep still. Feel what you feel. As an athlete, you have to come to terms with this kind of mystic-speak, which always made him think of Nathan, who despised it. Not despised it really but just thought it was dumb. Though Marcello in other respects, in other areas of life, was a fairly sensible hard-nosed guy, and Paul himself eventually had to admit that he believed some of this stuff. You don’t know why a shot goes in sometimes and sometimes not. There are technical things you can correct but even that is just another way of deferring the uncertainty, pushing it back to another stage in the process, because who knows why you sometimes keep your elbow at a certain angle and sometimes don’t when every time you practice a shot you try to practice it the same way.
His bedside clock, one of those radio cubes, said 5:53 … it was much too early to get up, the fore-part of the day was going to seem long enough already. The cream curtains had lozenges of yellow and brown; Dana had picked them. Most of the apartment was a compromise between what she wanted and what he would put up with. Which was his fault not hers – she was always asking for more involvement from him. More and more his default state of mind seemed to be preoccupation, some kind of not paying attention. Because there was nothing he wanted to pay attention to. At least, nothing around him. Cal sometimes. The wardrobe on the far wall (from Ligne Roset in Gramercy Park) had a mirror running up the middle, and with his head on the pillow Paul could see himself. A youngish middle-aged man looking tired, wide-eyed and slightly blinky at the same time. Me. Even when they were fighting, he disliked sleeping alone. The bed without Dana in it seemed colder and lopsided. But there was also this … relationship to yourself that needed to be interrupted or interfered with for you to get a decent night’s sleep. Otherwise you stayed up too late, reading, or woke up too early, or thrashed around under the covers, since nobody was there to mind or tell you to stop.
Paul was never good at lying in bed, even as a teenager. There was a steady moderately high-level current running through his body that kept pushing him around. But he tried to force himself for a minute to go back to sleep. That early morning, rainy light coming through the curtains is something he always liked, where you can’t tell if it’s just the dawn or the wet that darkens the day. He had heard Dana come in a little before ten o’clock last night, by which point he had already turned out the bedside lamp. But he was awake and waited for her. She seemed to be messing around in the kitchen, then he heard the noise of the TV, which annoyed him, because if he fell asleep now she’d wake him up coming to bed. It’s terrible the stupid frustrations that mount up against your lover for being somebody else and not you. He could have called out to Dana, but in this mood he didn’t want to shout or get up again, he was trying to wind down. And then he must have fallen asleep. She must have slept in the room with Cal.
Okay, feel what you feel but this is the kind of feeling you have to put out of your head. Unless it can serve as a useful distraction. Sometimes that works, too. Paul never much liked game days, he hated the fact that the only part that matters is a two-hour island in the middle, when you’re on court. The rest of the day you may as well be dead. But the slow build-up of tension also has a purifying effect, like keeping the fast on Yom Kippur, which he used to do as a kid, to please Bill. You’ve got one thing to worry about, a game of tennis. At least this is the story you tell yourself. Because the truth is, what
really happens, all these anxieties start rising up, you can’t sleep right, you can’t rest, you don’t want to waste your energy either. You worry about the time, you worry about your bags. The Germans have a word for it, Reisefieber, the unrest you suffer from the night before a flight. It takes a certain kind of craziness to live like this. Every time he walks on court, he thinks, don’t make me go out there.
Several years ago, before Cal was born, he rented a house in the Lake District after losing in the second round at Wimbledon. Just for a week to clear his head – Jean took the train up, too. They went hiking together, they ate pub lunches, he didn’t play or watch tennis. One afternoon they rented a canoe and went out on Lake Windermere. A midsummer day, but the water was choppy, it had rained that morning, the lake looked swollen, the temperature was somewhere in the 50s. Like winter in Austin. Paul started goofing around. He wanted to see how fast he could push it and dug his oar in hard – the weight of his body pulled them over, and suddenly he felt a momentum that he couldn’t reverse. The cold is what really knocks the air out of you. When he came up again, Jean was hanging onto the side of the boat, looking blue. ‘I don’t want to be in the water, I don’t want to be in the water,’ she kept saying, with rapid chattering teeth. The lifeguard had already seen them. He brought blankets, and they drank hot chocolates afterwards in one of the lakeside hotels.
For some reason, the sight of his sister repeating in a slightly insane way this totally reasonable phrase stuck with him. I don’t want to be in the water, I don’t want to be in the water. For the rest of the week, he used it to make fun of her, even though (as she liked to point out) the whole thing was his fault. And sometimes when he walked on court, especially at a big tournament, when what you’re walking out into is a lot of ambient noise, which turns into cheering briefly, and then back into ambient noise … at the moment you come through the tunnel, out of the shade, with your opponent walking beside you, whether you like him or not, Jean’s line ran through his head. Just in that tone of voice she used, which wasn’t whiny at all but extremely cold-sounding and matter-of-fact. Last night, when she called, he was shaving; he always shaved the night before a match. And he basically didn’t want to be on the phone; he tried to work the razor over his cheek with the phone in his ear, switching sides as he went along. His attention span for other people was incredibly small at the moment – like one of those hardened arteries that can barely let through the oxygenated blood. But she got through anyway, and he felt like, if I tell you what I actually think about what you’re doing, you’ll have good reason to call me a hypocrite later on. Which doesn’t mean that what I’m thinking isn’t true.
A Weekend in New York Page 24