Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  For a moment, in that bar, with the dark wood and the wine pulsing through my veins and your fingers touching my hair, I felt you wanting me in a way no one else ever had or, I felt certain, ever would. It was as powerful as any drug I’d sampled with Andrew from his pharmacy of esoteric leaves and powders, as powerful as any emotion I would experience until I had Nate and a whole other world of feelings opened to me that left what we’d had together faded juvenilia.

  Had I let go of the wheel for just a nanosecond, you would have left some bills on the table and put your hand on the small of my back and shepherded me somewhere with an enormous bed and a sea of pillows and plush towels. Am I wrong? And here is the watershed, or perhaps I should say miracle, given who I was then: having just months before met Paul, who while I nearly torpedoed my future was watching tennis with his father in the Great Neck house where he’d grown up, awaiting my call about which train I would take to come meet his parents for the first time, there was a faint but already beating awareness that the moment had arrived when I could choose happiness and, amazingly, because nothing in my past would ever have predicted such a thing, I did.

  *

  When Corrine and I first opened Esther Sweetie, my bakery named after my mother-in-law, who’d taught me during Paul and my Sunday visits to her house how to make coconut cake and hamantaschen and plum tarts and lemon squares, on the site of a former East Harlem bread factory Paul had discovered after the original place burned to the ground, I thought what I was trading was creating something no one really wanted, my poems, for something everyone wants. “It’s not true,” Paul argued with me. “How can you say that about your poems? You’ve published at least two dozen, right? You’ve won awards. You had a poem in The Atlantic. How many people can say that?”

  “Twenty-some poems in literary journals that no one other than other people who publish in literary journals ever reads, a few awards, and a poem in The Atlantic is not a life’s work.”

  “What about art for art’s sake? I thought you believed in that.”

  “Maybe for the rare genius. But I’m not Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens. The culture will survive without my poems. My work is unwanted. I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean it in an utterly descriptive way. Regardless of whether my poems are brilliant or lousy, there is not an audience for them. I don’t want to spend my life creating something that sits in my computer hard drive and does nothing for anyone except make me miserable.”

  Paul took my hands between his.

  I started to cry. It would break my heart to give up on writing poems. But it had come to feel wrong that I would have whatever talents I’d been bequeathed from my father’s beloved nucleotides and all the benefits of my fine education and then do nothing but create misery for myself.

  Paul looked as anguished as I felt, anguished that he could not fix my pain the way he and his father did with their clients’ fire-ravaged homes.

  “Look,” I said, wiping my tears on the back of my hand. “It was you who taught me that we make our own happiness. Not all of it, of course. We can’t control earthquakes or cancer or death. But when I let you into my life, I turned it around.”

  My husband rarely wears anything aside from Levi’s and Tshirts, but like his father he always carries a pressed white handkerchief. He handed it to me.

  I blew my nose. “I still remember the first time I met your parents. I took the train to their house. You and your father were sitting side by side on the couch, watching a tennis match, enjoying each other’s company. Your mother had three pans of red velvet cake in the oven. She was sifting confectioner’s sugar for the cream cheese icing. You and your father could smell the cake and were looking forward to eating it after dinner.”

  Paul studied me, perhaps remembering the afternoon, the cake, perhaps knowing in some inchoate way the import of that day. “Imagine if your mother only baked cakes that pleased her, if she didn’t care whether you and your father liked them. That’s the situation with my poems. I’m done with making something only for myself.”

  *

  Having stayed up late waiting for Nate to get home, I want to drink a glass of juice and eat a slice of the cranberry bread I brought home last night from the bakery and read the paper and hopefully get heavy eyes and be able to go back to sleep. The Times, though, is not yet here. I look around as if it might have been tossed under the shoe rack we keep by the door, a silly sign still on our door from when Nate was little: OUR FLOORS AND OUR CHILD WHO LIVES ON OUR FLOOR / APPRECIATE YOUR LEAVING YOUR SHOES BY THE DOOR. “À la Japonaise,” I used to joke because women hate to mar their outfits by removing their footwear and men worry about holes in their socks or unpleasant smells emanating from their feet, but you would have known the real reason, you’d taught it to me when you left your collection of running shoes outside our door because you abhorred the idea of street dirt being trekked through our rooms.

  On the shoe rack, placed neatly next to Nate’s basketball sneakers, is a pair of burgundy ballet flats, elasticized along the edges to grip the foot, with a small black bow on the top, the kind of shoes worn barefoot with skinny jeans even in winter by the girls at Nate’s school. I stare at the shoes, as though they might be a forgotten pair of mine, as though they might have been left by our housekeeper, whose bunioned feet would never fit in a shoe so tiny and delicate, my heart pounding out of control as I try to come up with some other explanation than what I know to be true.

  *

  Closing the door, I review in my mind Nate’s arrival home last night. As always, I’d waited up for him. He’d come home at our agreed-upon time and I’d kissed him, checking for the smell of alcohol or smoke. He blew his breath into my face. “Nothing, Mom, nothing,” his voice a mixture of resentment at the intrusion and resignation that it was justified since there had been two nights this past year, one only five months ago, when he’d come home drunk and vomiting, so sick I’d sat on the bathroom floor with him until three in the morning holding his old beach bucket under his chin while he moaned, calling his pediatrician in the middle of the night to ask about alcohol poisoning, slipping ice chips through his cracked lips and then, after we’d managed to get him cleaned up enough to get into his bed, sleeping next to him on the floor to make sure if he got sick again he didn’t aspirate vomit into his lungs.

  Before these nights, I’d thought of my son as a good boy, sweet and smart and hardworking and, when he’s happy, funny and at times kind of goofy like his father, soft in the way of boys who have been well loved by their fathers. Not like you, who lived in fear of the dark moods your father had brought home along with a never properly healed bullet wound from a war. Like his own father, Paul had taken Nate to the park every day weather would possibly permit. Winters, they’d arrive home in ski jackets and hats, pink-cheeked with freezing noses ready for steaming hot chocolate and sugar cookies; summers they’d come in sweaty and parched, gulping glasses of water and devouring the ice-cream cake or cherry pie or whatever else I had made that afternoon.

  I put one of Paul’s corduroy shirts on over my pajamas and walk back to Nate’s room. I pause before his closed bedroom door. I knock, wait a few seconds, and then turn the handle.

  For a moment, in the dim light of the room, I cannot take in what I am seeing. Two heads in my son’s single bed. Nate, sprawled on his back with his mouth slightly open, his face oily from sleep, a musky scent emanating from his skin. Next to him, on her side with her back against the wall, a girl with a mess of curly red hair and her full breasts exposed.

  I stare at the girl, at her pink nipples, the beauty mark on her collarbone. Even though she’s lying down, I can see that she’s short but with some meat on her. There’s a condom wrapper thrown on the floor and a wad of tissues inside which must be the used thing.

  The girl opens her eyes. She has a sweet round face with big brown eyes and full lips, and a fleeting thought passes through my mind that I am proud of my son for choosing a girl outside the emaciated b
lond mold that is the ideal of his group. A look of terror forms on her face. She yanks the sheet up to her shoulders and hides in the pillow.

  I shake my son, as I do every morning, and he moans. He turns his back to me, as he has every school morning since he was three.

  “Nate,” I say, first softly, then, a second time, louder.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Nate, wake up.”

  “Just let me sleep, Mom. I’m still tired.”

  I shake harder. “Nate. You have to wake up.”

  My son shifts back toward me. He opens his eyes, shuts them, and then opens them again.

  “Oh, fu-uck.”

  “Nate, what is going on here?”

  “Mom, get out of here, okay? Give me a minute. Fuck.” He pounds the mattress with his fist, then turns to the girl, her face still buried in the pillow. “The alarm didn’t go off,” he tells her.

  “You both have two minutes to get your clothes on and meet me in the kitchen. Two minutes. I’m serious.”

  I walk back to the kitchen. My temples pound, my blood pressure soaring. I take a deep breath, irritated that I can’t call Paul, his cell off while he sleeps due to the work calls that come at all hours, Esther panicking about Herb if the house phone were to ring so early.

  I fill the coffee carafe with water and measure the ground beans into the basket. Then I fill the teakettle and start it boiling in case the girl wants tea, take the Saran off the cranberry bread, put out plates. I can’t get the girl’s face out of my mind. Something about it seems familiar, as though I knew her when she was younger, perhaps from one of Nate’s camps or even preschool, the face utterly altered but with the individual features essentially the same.

  Nate pokes his head into the kitchen. He’s put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and his hair is sticking up. There’s a rangy scent to him, and I’m not happy that it reminds me of you in the mornings when you’d reach for me and I’d push you away, teasing, Go shower, I mean it, you nuzzling your face in my neck, telling me I smelled like a shell or beach grass or something else from the sea.

  Behind Nate is the girl, dressed now.

  “Okay, Mom, she’s going to leave. I’m just going to walk her to the elevator.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend. “This is not a joke. You both come in here and sit down.”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Yes, Nate.” My jaw clenches. I am grinding my teeth. Over the past few months, Nate and I have on a couple of occasions approached this treacherous place: the awareness that he no longer has to do what I say. On each occasion, he has moved back from the precipice, both of us desperately hoping that we will eventually be able to cross that chasm without a disaster.

  Nate rolls his eyes and comes into the kitchen. The girl follows, looking at the floor. She’s wearing leggings with a white peasant shirt and a long cardigan. In the light, her hair is amazing: pumpkin-colored, with corkscrew curls that cascade down her back. I pour two glasses of juice and hand them each one.

  “Would you like some coffee or tea?” I ask the girl.

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Milk and sugar?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I heat some milk in a pitcher in the microwave and bring the pitcher and the sugar bowl to the table. Nate and the girl are still standing, Nate with a hip against the counter, the girl shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

  “Sit.”

  Nate gives me his dead-eyes look, his way of telling me that he refuses to engage and if I insist he will foil me by turning himself into a zombie. The girl perches gingerly on the edge of one of the kitchen chairs, stirring two spoons of sugar into the mug of coffee I’ve handed her. From the diamond studs in her ears, the cashmere cardigan, the Coach purse, it looks like she comes from an affluent family, but that she carries her privilege lightly, does not, as do some of the kids from Nate’s school, think it makes her special. Our apartment, overlooking Morningside Park—when we first moved here a scary place littered with broken glass and discarded needles, now a haven with terraced esplanades and enormous weeping trees but still dangerous after dark so that I shudder wondering how she arrived here in the middle of the night—must seem foreign and bohemian: bookshelves overflowing with Paul’s LP collection and my poetry volumes, walls covered with paintings done by artist friends, no lady decorator fabrics and fussy kitchen tiles.

  I start to cut slices of cranberry bread, then, thinking of the condom wrapper, catch myself, leaving it to these two not-children. My son, who’d not served his own food until he was fourteen, waiting always for his father or me to place his plate in front of him until I’d had to tell him it was too babyish for a boy his age, cuts himself a large jagged slice.

  “Take some,” I say to the girl.

  She cuts a sliver, and for a moment I worry that she is one of those girls who are afraid of food, who won’t eat in front of boys. She eats a forkful as though to be polite, gagging slightly from anxiety, it seems, and then takes a second bite with what I can see is real hunger.

  “This is delicious. Nate told me you own a bakery in Harlem.”

  “I do.”

  “He told me that you were a poet and that you gave up poems to bake cakes.”

  “I did.”

  “I write poems,” she says. A funny sound comes from her throat, almost a burp.

  She covers her mouth. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I’m kind of nervous.”

  “She won a Scholastic Gold Key for one of her poems last year,” Nate says.

  “Congratulations.”

  “And she went to the writing program at Skidmore last summer.”

  I’ve run a business now for twelve years, but there are still moments like this, with these two kids, one my own flesh and blood, who’ve wronged me in ways I can’t yet articulate—some twisted combination of putting themselves in danger and violating my home, sneaking behind my back and yet under my roof—when I can’t seize control of a situation. The first summer I lived with you when we’d have a fight and you would raise your voice, I would burst into tears. Jesus Christ, Louisa, I recall you once saying, don’t you know how to fight back? But I didn’t. My mother had either endured my father’s condescensions or taken revenge in her own subterranean ways.

  I clear my throat and fold my hands on the table. “Okay, so what happened here?”

  Nate peers at me. He’s discarded the dead-eyes look. “Mom, you know what happened.”

  “No, I don’t.” I study the girl. For the first time, she looks directly at me, and again I feel a disturbing sense, a déjà vu but not exactly, of having somehow already met her. “Where do you go to school?” I ask.

  She glances at Nate.

  “What does that matter?” Nate answers for her.

  “Listen, we’re going to work together on this, or…” I pause, catching myself before I make some kind of wild threat—call the police, boarding school, roads Nate knows I would never take.

  What I want to do is to call Corrine, who has come through the other side of some pretty awful experiences with her daughter, but I’m afraid that if I get up, even just to pee, Nate will quickly usher the girl out or, even worse, slither away with her to disappear into one of the teenage lairs these kids with their constant phone access to one another can always find.

  What I want to ask Corrine is whether I need to call the girl’s parents. Is that the stupid conventional course or the adult thing that I have to find the backbone to do?

  “Chapin,” the girl says. “I’m in eleventh grade, like Nate.”

  Nate cuts himself a second piece of cranberry bread, and a wave of ridiculous relief that at least he’s eating washes over me. Over the summer, after we’d grounded him for the second drinking incident, he’d gone on a health kick, rejecting anything from my bakery, relishing the power of being in control of his own body after having been spoonfed his entire life. When his stomach turned concave, I’d insisted he go to the pediatrician to be weighed. He
’d lost twenty-three pounds. We’d spent a miserable two weeks in August in Italy while I anxiously registered every half-eaten panini, every meal at which he ordered only a salad, until finally, in Venice, he began to really eat again: first gelatos, then fried artichokes, then plates of spaghettini, his appetite slowly returning and a reasonable amount of the weight.

  He yawns. What my son wants to do is go back to sleep.

  The girl takes another bite. “This is so good,” she says, her voice a little too loud, as though she thinks if she just keeps filling the room with sound everything will be okay. “My mother hates to cook. Our housekeeper does all the cooking, but my dad doesn’t like her food so we have a lot of takeout too.”

  “Do I know your mother?”

  The girl looks at Nate. He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t think so.”

  Her voice drops in volume. “She’s a therapist.”

  I know that I am now on thin ice and that I have to quickly skate forward. “And what’s your name?”

  My son wipes the cranberry bread crumbs from his mouth. “Mom, what the fuck? Why are you going there?”