Henry took a moment to revel in this fantasy of who he might be if he hadn’t been who he was—then he ripped open the envelope.
Inside was a single sheet of ordinary white paper on which Leopold had written, “Have you done what I asked?”
Henry, sighing, answered aloud, “No, Father, I have not spoken to the boys.”
Now he was free to throw the envelope away, and its contents too. Henry crumpled the paper into a tight ball and hurled it across the room.
Leopold, honestly. Leopold, please.
* * *
Costanza’s morning ultrasound produced a mixed report: her follicle census had diminished further to seven total (four right, three left), though their sizes (fifteen to seventeen millimeters) were “decently” on target for day eleven. Chances were good, Dr. Woo told her, that Costanza would be receiving her HCG shot that night or the one following.
“I bet you’ll be glad to be over this first big hurdle,” Dr. Woo said, “and to have a break from the drugs for a few days.”
“I’d much rather have the hope—the possibility—of the situation improving. I’d be willing to take the drugs much longer if I thought it would do any good.”
“But it wouldn’t,” Dr. Woo said matter-of-factly.
“Yes. I’m aware of that.”
Costanza had made her peace with the plain-speaking Dr. Woo. She could do nothing for Costanza anyway. There was nothing anyone could do. She was yet again in the land of waiting, that diabolical no-man’s-land. If her life were like a diary (there was Morton, unbidden yet again), she would flip the pages forward and know what would happen. But life was not like that. Life was a flypaper present, a shape-shifting past, a future that forever held answers tantalizingly just out of sight …
Costanza was smart enough to have organized a plan for her day. She was going to see the insect displays at the Museum of Natural History, specifically those related to ants. She had received an e-mail from an editor about the possibility of her translating a coming-of-age memoir by an entomologist whose specialty was ant colonies, and she wanted to try to figure out if she had any affinity for the science parts.
As she made her way up the museum steps, Costanza was transported back in time, back, deeply back, into her life. This had never before happened to her with quite such a visceral jolt. She approached the main doors as a nearly forty-year-old woman and at the same instant as an eleven-year-old girl, walking hand in hand with her father on one of the few visits they made to New York together. Was it the cant of the stairs, the cut of the stone? The distinctive timbre and level of noise in the great hall, with all those chattering children? However it happened, thirty years dissolved in a moment, and she was there with Alan, the two of them alone together staring at the barosaurus skeleton presiding over that enormous room in all of its improbability as he said to her, “Piggles”—this just one of her ever-morphing nicknames—“do you know what? I was about your age when I came here myself as a kid, with my grandfather. And the place looks exactly the same.” She remembered him growing quiet—doing his own bit of time travel?—and then adding, “He was a good friend to me, my grandfather. Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit down, I think of what a good friend he was to me, and that makes me feel better. I wish you could have known him, and I wish he could have known you. It’s just a killer.”
What was just a killer? She remembered those words so clearly, but had no idea what he meant. It was just a killer that his grandfather died, that the generations passed so definitively, that her father felt so much sadness? It was just a killer that she could not ask him what was just a killer. It was just a killer that he killed himself—oh, yes, that too. That forever.
* * *
Costanza’s original plan for after leaving the museum had been to walk home through the park, but after spending several hours on her feet, she was weary and in some discomfort. Her ovaries were large, hard, and swollen, and so she fell into a cab. The ride across town was slow and gave her time to think about how alien her body had become to her. She wondered how those ants did it: once a queen reached maturity, Costanza learned that morning, she spent the rest of her life laying eggs. When conditions were right—warm enough and humid enough after a rain, not too wet and not too windy—sexually reproducing ants left their parent colony and flew a long distance, and the females mated with at least one winged male from another nest. Afterward the inseminated female, a new queen, started her own colony, detached her wings, and settled in for a lifetime of reproduction, fertilizing eggs from the sperm cells she retained from the onetime nuptial flight. She could live as long as thirty years and have millions of babies.
Millions of babies off a single squirt of sperm! A lifetime of fecundity! And here Costanza was, with her eked-out follicles and her amped-up hormones, feeling—out of nowhere and in a span of four minutes—a stab of pain and a flash of heat followed by a sudden chill, all these regular reminders that her body was not coasting along on its own, generating its own chemistry, but was under the control of Dr. Henry Weissman & Co.
She knew it was important not to dwell on how little control she had. On most days her mind was challenging enough to tame into a semblance of steadiness and calm; now that this other, involuntary stream of sensation was feeding her perceptions, she felt as though she were in danger, at any moment, of simply imploding. Or exploding. One more hot flash and she felt she might hop into the front seat, shove the driver aside, and gun it across Seventy-Ninth Street, mowing down a sea of yellow cabs on her way.
How she would relish that—the speed, the power. The freedom.
Twenty—not even—ten yards farther east, she had a different vision: of tearing off the driver’s turban, releasing his soft long hair, and mounting him in the back seat of the taxi.
* * *
One problem with the drugs—one further problem with the drugs—was the way they made her see things more dramatically, more darkly and problematically. Over this too Costanza felt she had diminished control. “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are,” Morton loved to say—especially when her mood was black and critical, and they were circling around a fight. (He lifted the quotation, apparently Talmudic in origin and a favorite of his, from a greeting card, a provenance he tended not to disclose.)
She saw things as she was: yes—and no. Costanza let herself into the apartment and quickly took its measure. The rooms, though quiet and still, did not strike her as particularly peaceful. Something was disturbed; she felt it. Something, or someone.
She wasn’t so wrong. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she found Andrew in bed with the blinds drawn, lying flat on his stomach. He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of faded blue briefs, looking like a combination of an overgrown boy and a statue fallen off its plinth. She saw him and then, in the next second, saw the David, Donatello’s David, which they had looked at together that day in Florence. Andrew had something of the sculpture’s sinuous long grace and beauty, and he didn’t recognize it, or enjoy it, at all. What a confounding condition young adulthood was. All that vigor and freshness, all that physical lusciousness, and you did everything in your power not to be in the moment, not to live. She had been like that, like Andrew. Twisted up inside, confused, at perennial war with her mother—this even before her father died—and afterward, oh, forget it; years just vanished into confusion, depression, a perpetual state of holding the world at a mocking distance. She now saw all that as an expression of fear. Like Andrew, she used to retreat to her bed. Nowhere else felt so safe or so still; so neutral. Of course it was neutral. Nothing happened there. Except for reading. Reading happened there. And waiting. For what? She no longer remembered.
As she stood there looking at Andrew, her heart opened up to him, to the parts of herself she saw in him, to those lost years she would never have back, just as he would never have this time—this moment, this day—back. Why on a free, unencumbered afternoon should he lie in a veritable stupor? What could she say to him to make h
im understand?
She touched him on the leg. His skin was warm and soft.
Andrew’s left eye opened, then closed. She took that to mean he was ready for conversation. “You were out late last night.”
He groaned. “Depends.”
“On?”
“How you define night.”
“I didn’t think there was much room for interpretation. Sundown to sunrise, typically.”
“Then the correct response is yes, I was.”
“Were you up the whole time?”
“I was out walking. I went to my mom’s for a while. Then I walked some more.”
“You walked all night, in this cold?”
“I took breaks. Once for tea. Once for hot chocolate. I saw the sun come up.”
“Have you done anything with your day other than sleep?”
He answered her with a yawn.
“Why don’t you come food shopping with me? We can cook together afterward. I don’t know about you, but I need to keep busy.”
He looked at her. “Yes, that’s how you keep it together. Keep calm.”
“Well, I prefer to work or keep busy rather than”—she gestured at him—“sink.”
“My ‘sinking’ unnerves you?”
She thought. “A little.”
Andrew pulled himself into a sitting position. “Well, I’ve also been keeping busy. I’ve been editing some new pictures.”
He gestured at his bulletin board. The surface was covered with images of Henry, covert images taken while his attention was elsewhere. Having coffee, or speaking to Costanza, or getting dressed. They were taken through cracks in doors, from behind the backs of chairs, down long halls. Dozens of different Henrys, surreptitious Henrys, glimpsed, snatched, or stolen Henrys, were pinned to the cork.
“You’re spying on your father now, the way you spied on that reader, your neighbor.”
“I am trying to see him unfiltered—unaware. Without his seeing me.”
“Why?”
“I did a paper last year for my history class about the early days of photography. In the time of Nadar, when photography was the new thing in Paris, do you know what Balzac believed? He had this idea that bodies were made up of layers, and that every picture snatched one away.”
Costanza was perplexed. “You’re trying to … strip your father down? See his essence?”
“I’ve been looking at Henry all my life, yet sometimes I feel he’s a complete mystery to me.”
She sighed. “I don’t know what to say, Andrew. I have the feeling you’re asking me to explain Henry to you.”
“Actually, I’m not. But it’s interesting that you think you could.”
Andrew swung his feet to the ground and reached for his jeans. He lingered for a moment—as if he was enjoying Costanza’s eyes on him—before pulling them on.
His getting dressed changed the mood in the room. She was relieved by that.
“What are we making for dinner?”
“I was thinking fish.”
“Well, we’d better buy a lot of it. Walking around all night, you work up a serious appetite.”
* * *
For the second time in a week Henry came home to delicious scents, and a less than delicious scene. In the foyer he detected a strong aroma of lemon and sugar. Over that was fish, and over that was either garlic or onions. Henry wasn’t sure which until he edged toward the door to the kitchen. It was onions, sautéing in a skillet. Andrew was standing at the kitchen counter, carefully dicing parsley. Costanza was standing next to him, trimming asparagus. They were working side by side, on two matching cutting boards. Since when did the kitchen have two matching cutting boards and two good sharp knives?
Costanza and Andrew had their backs to Henry, and he observed them for a solid minute. They didn’t exchange a single word. Their cutting fell in and out of sync, like two people running or walking alongside each other, but even when it was out of sync, it wasn’t, quite; the way they were standing next to each other, leaning into each other slightly though without touching, yet each with an awareness of what the other was doing, seemed to Henry to be full of silent connection.
Toward the end of Henry’s long watchful minute he began to feel a tinge of shame as he stood there, spying on his wife and his son. He felt dirty too. He was dirty. Rather than step into the room as he had intended, he slipped down the hall and went to shower away his day.
* * *
When he returned, Andrew was setting the table, and Costanza was preparing a vegetable dish, carrots having joined the asparagus, onions, and parsley in a large low pan. There was a cheerful clatter too, as Andrew set down cutlery, glasses, and plates and Costanza stirred her vegetables and shifted the lid on a second pot.
Henry resolved to make this his official return home, and to ignore the earlier one. He saw to it that his energy picked up as he stepped in, bearing the challah and a pair of candles he had picked up on his way uptown.
He greeted Costanza with a kiss.
Andrew glanced at the bread, the candles. Instantly his face hardened. “Celebrating Shabbos now?”
Shabbos: he even said it with Leopold’s intonation.
“I walked by a bakery.” Henry shrugged. “And then I fell into a shop that sold housewares. They had beeswax candles. Real beeswax. One thing just led to the other.”
Henry, unwrapping the candles, gave them a slow appreciative sniff.
Costanza asked if he wanted his mother’s candlesticks. Henry nodded. She left the room.
Andrew waited for her to go before he said, “Do you know how happy it would have made Grandpa to see you light the candles just once?”
“Men don’t customarily light the candles, Andrew,” Henry said. “I was thinking of asking Cos—”
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to say kiddush over the wine as well.”
“These rituals do tend to come in threes.”
“You’re such a hypocrite, Henry.”
“I’m Henry now?”
“Every time we saw Grandpa on a Friday, Henry, and he said the prayers, your face would turn to stone. He dies, and you turn into Mr. Super Jew.”
“That I am not.”
“You’re a fake. A phony.”
“I don’t believe I’m those things either, Andrew. I’m feeling nostalgic, I’m thinking about your grandfather. And your grandmother. Do you remember how she used to bake her own challah?” Henry indicated the loaf.
Andrew said nothing, acknowledged nothing.
“I’ve had a tough day, and I felt that this might be a nice thing for me, for all of us, to do.”
“You despise your religion. You always have.”
“Quite honestly it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Enlighten me.”
Henry took a deep breath, but the only word he said was “Why?” The rest of it—should I, you little prick or something in that vein—remained unsaid.
“You know what Grandpa called you?”
“Various things, in his day.”
Costanza, returning with Leopold’s candlesticks, from the doorway heard Andrew say, “A self-hating Jew. He called you a self-hating Jew.”
“Never to my face,” Henry said evenly.
“You think I’m making it up?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I never heard your grandfather call me that.” Henry paused. “Anyway this too is more complicated than you think. If you want to have a candid conversation with me on the subject, that’s one thing, but to pass on a remark like that, casually, and in front of”—he glanced at Costanza—“I just don’t see the point.”
“I do just hate you sometimes.”
“Yes, I sense that. I wish I understood why.”
“Because you are—who you are. And remind me, who is that exactly?”
“Someone”—Henry poured himself a glass of wine—“who is ready for a drink, with or without the kiddush.”
“That’s just another bit of finessing. You
deflect and try to take control of the conversation at the same time.”
“Possibly.” Henry raised his glass. “But I still choose to have my glass of wine.”
“And I choose to leave.”
“Again?” Henry said under his breath.
A moment later the sound of the front door slamming reached them in the kitchen.
Costanza looked in the direction of the foyer. “He’s having a hard time, you know.”
Henry took a sip of wine. “He’s not the only one, my dear.”
“Nevertheless…”
“The father should think first of the child?”
Costanza studied Henry, trying to decipher his mood.
He sipped again from his glass of wine. “Tell me about your day. Have they called yet?”
“You don’t know?”
“I had to leave the office a little early. Kligerman led the meeting.”
“They called, yes. The HCG is tonight. We’re—you’re—to administer it at three a.m.”
Henry nodded. “I did know what your results were from this morning’s blood work.”
“Not great.”
“But not awful.”
“Is there hope?”
“There is hope, yes.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
“No.”
Costanza disappeared into thought. “Do we understand what we’re doing here, really?”
Henry let out a long impatient sigh. “You know what I notice? Sometimes when Andrew is around and being, let’s just say, very Andrew, you seem to become suddenly—doubting. Of me. Of us.”
Costanza ran her hand through her hair and rested it on the back of her neck. “Andrew’s at an age where it’s his job to be angry at his parents. I can question you, and wonder about us, and this”—she gestured at her abdomen—“all on my own. I know what you’re thinking: What I’m saying is not all on my own. There are the drugs…”
“I was not thinking that at all.”
“But you have before.”
What Is Missing Page 29