On the Germans sang, though not comprehensibly to Anne. She had only a nodding acquaintance with German, whose order she admired, along with its mechanical approach to word construction, as she understood it. The voices carried up to the prophets and saints painted neatly on the vaulted ceiling, and Anne assumed that holy collective could translate the choral message, whatever it was.
Forget the strictures of the Church, and its dogma. All you needed was right here in the room. Anne allowed the reverent sung offerings of others to give her, as the wooden Mary had her father, a precious, immaterial comfort — the sensation that somewhere in this hallowed space, within these high stone walls, there was understanding and grace. Even for one’s self-imposed losses. Especially for those.
17
It was not a question of betrayal and forgiveness but rather of change and acceptance. Acceptance required discipline, and that was one of Anne’s tasks. She did not care for Tricia’s curt summary — ‘It’s a story of men chasing tail, as men have done for millennia.’ Anne saw the situation differently. A desire shared by two people breaks into two different desires, and the couple breaks with it.
Anne had never wanted to have children.
She knew this about herself as soon as she knew anything. It was an obligation of life, not just of love: know who you are. Anne’s certainty that she would never be a mother came at the same time she absorbed the possibility of an expanse of opportunity far from her parents’ unhappy home, where intelligence could be rewarded not suspected, and her pretty mouth and the sharp sayings that came from it would be appreciated rather than slapped shut. The piano, an instrument Anne was benched in front of aged three and forced to practice for hours a week long into her teens, need not be played obsessively. She could quit. And she could leave. Anne applied to colleges several states away from Michigan, and as a young woman fulfilled the fantasy she had had since she was small, of placing all her possessions in a spotted handkerchief at the end of a stick balanced on her shoulder, and walking away.
Anne told Jasper her feelings about children from the beginning. It was an essential Anne never covered over, a central vein at the core of her, something no one with integrity could hide. Do you want to be a parent or not? Speak now. Or forever hold your peace.
Anne spoke. When they first met; when she was twenty-eight and they reunited; and again over the years. This truth remained constant, and Jasper listened and agreed. Work was more important. Neither could abide the idea of the leaking out of self, time, energy and imagination that parenthood required, and they were comfortably united in their views. Child-free, they traveled together, read, made love, worked. They slept late, or they woke early. When colleagues with young children made envious jokes, Anne always thought: Well, you could have chosen this, too.
The only wavering came when Anne once got pregnant in her early thirties. The couple was living in Nice. For Anne, the decision to terminate was so clear she hardly felt the need to discuss it, and the only issues were practical: where to find the best care and treatment. She trusted Jasper to locate that for her — for them.
He did not hesitate. Speaking the better French, Jasper explained the situation, booked the appointment, arranged the soonest possible date. But the morning they were to go to the clinic, he asked her to walk with him around their local streets for a few minutes before they left.
‘I have to ask you this, love.’ His voice had a slight rasp, as though it had been worn down. He looked underslept. ‘You don’t want to . . . leave it behind, do you? Teaching, the university . . . ? Just run away from everything and, I don’t know, tend grapes, have little . . . Pierre’ — he laughed, as if at his own whimsy — ‘help out in the vineyards? Live together a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean?’
She smiled indulgently, as if at an imaginative joke. ‘I know so little about viniculture,’ she said. ‘But I’ll come visit you at harvest time, and trample a few grapes.’
‘So,’ he continued, and suddenly Anne saw that this was Jasper’s main point, and he was serious. ‘No Pierre then? No new life?’
‘Why are you asking this, Jazz? Is that what you want?’ Her voice had a sharpness that came, she felt it, from panic. Fear did that sometimes: transform, in the speaking, into anger. ‘A baby?’ Her voice sounded accusatory; she could not help it.
He heard her edge, and stopped and turned around, abruptly, to walk back toward the car. He tried to relocate the notion that it had been a passing fanciful idea. ‘No, of course not. I want you, darling.’ He wasn’t looking at her, though, and he sounded subdued. ‘Above all. I want you. Let’s go. Allons-y.’
Part of Anne knew they should talk more, right then. Exactly then. But she was too angry, and did not trust herself.
When they traveled to Venice after, there was no noticeable trace of regret in Jasper. Certainly not in Anne. It was a wonderful, romantic few days there, of art and food and churches — at Jazz’s urging they went to Santa Maria dei Miracoli, among others — and Anne had put the preceding episode behind her.
It was years later, during a fraught dinner conversation, when Anne thought of that moment in Nice again. By then the couple had been settled for a decade in New York. The reward for their professional singlemindedness came when NYU offered posts to them both, along with an ample apartment in a high-rise on Bleecker Street. They had a living room that looked toward the giant edifices of the financial district, and a generous study each. Anne had published two books and, especially with her first, The Awakening of Influence, had built a room of her own within the broader cultural argument about literature. In their books, both Jasper and Anne had shifted paradigms. As they were meant to.
When their conversation began, Anne had a dizzying sensation of the slippage of time — how the past bleeds right into the present, and events that had seemed separated safely by many years can really be, somehow, simultaneous.
18
A wine-lit night, a candle-warmed meal, on a restorative stay-in Saturday after a week filled with students, lectures, bureaucracy. For her married-with-children friends, Anne knew, evenings at home could seem like a continuation of work and noise, the tasks of a different, familial kind that also involved organization, rules, instruction. Anne and Jasper’s night was a luxury: two people simply agreeing to cook and delight one another at home. Talking, and then what followed talking.
Jasper roasted a whole seabass encrusted in salt. ‘Poor creature,’ he said as he slid the fish into the oven, ‘you can dream that you are still in the ocean.’ Anne worked alongside Jazz in the narrow apartment kitchen. It required a good deal of elbow jostling and culinary dancing, but they managed good-naturedly, with passing jokes and the occasional neck-kiss. Anne tossed an endive salad with lemon juice, avocado, and toasted hazelnuts. Jasper opened a bottle of wine and they sat together in the living room, Wall Street glittering through the darkness while the scent of the cooking fish gradually filled the air.
‘Ron Edwards’ daughter came by today. While touring the campus. A nice girl, very clever,’ Jasper said. ‘Wants to be a doctor.’
‘I’d have thought she would find it constraining to go to the university where her father teaches.’
‘I know.’
‘Or even the same city, frankly. Don’t children usually want to get as far away as they can from their parents?’
‘Well, they have a nice relationship. It seemed very easy. Though she’s looking at other campuses too, of course.’ Jasper paused. He held his glass in his right hand, and studied its white-gold contents. ‘Seeing them together made me think again, though,’ he began slowly. Jasper was not one to hesitate when he spoke, and that he did now caught Anne’s attention. ‘About having a child.’
Anne swallowed with difficulty. Her appetite disappeared. She placed her glass very carefully down on the table, as if it might otherwise shatter in her hands.
‘What?’ she sa
id, unnecessarily. She felt the sudden racing adrenalined need to slow everything right down. Hold on, hold on. Wait. Arrête!
There was Jasper’s face beside her, so known, every curve and angle. The handsome, truth-speaking mouth; the long nose; the sandy, silvering hair falling across the broad forehead she loved to soothe. His eyes, cobalt blue in this light, were liquid with an emotion Anne had not seen in him before. Doubt. Jasper had not doubted himself around Anne before, not even when they discussed, as they occasionally had to over the years, infidelities or strayings. Jazz knew Anne, and he knew himself around her. That knowledge had been the unbreakable strength of their bond.
‘Do you think about it, love? A child?’
Suddenly, it seemed breakable.
‘Jazz,’ Anne said in a low voice. She had found that nickname for him near the very beginning. Jazz was their shared music, and the way she came back to the piano, gradually, after all those childhood years playing Chopin and Mozart. Jasper had encouraged her. ‘I’ve told you. You’ve known from the start. I will never be a mother.’
Jasper slid his eyes away from her, and drank.
‘Of course, you’ve said that.’ He waved a long, supple hand at the ghost child they were — he was — conjuring. Anne felt that the gesture suggested that her earlier words had been not much more than an opinion, one she might have expressed about a film or play they saw together. ‘But at the risk of sounding clichéd . . .’ He smiled sorrowfully, fetchingly; or so he must have imagined, for Anne could see with a cold dismay that he was acting for her now. She felt herself to be sitting a great distance from Jasper on this familiar sofa — perhaps she was out there on Wall Street, where the lights endlessly shone, or beyond Wall Street even, splashing in the gentle waves of the blackened river. ‘I thought you might change your mind.’
‘Why? Why would I do that — at forty-one?’ And now there were other vibrations in Anne’s tone, not just, How can you pretend not to know this? But also, Why would you raise such a question again, now, when I’m this age?
Jasper drained his glass, folded his arms, sat sideways, angled, on his chair. He too looked out at the postcard view through their plate-glass windows.
‘People do,’ he said simply. ‘People change.’ A chill came into his voice and for the first time she heard a novel note — of condescension. She would hear more of it in the painful time ahead. ‘Though you seem very clear. Very sure of yourself.’
‘I am.’ Yet in uttering those two words, Anne could hear that what had seemed a strength in her before, admirable, lovable to Jasper — Anne’s clarity, her decisiveness — was being cast in a souring new light. Suddenly she was stubborn, or trapped, or unbending. How swiftly your image in the other’s eye could alter, if the other was himself altering.
Anne could hardly eat the dinner they had made together, that Jazz served silently at the round table over which would ordinarily have traveled talk, ideas, in-jokes. Untold that evening. The fish turned to ash in their mouths, the salad had wilted and browned. Their bed was quiet that night, two bodies touching only by accident.
The specific question was folded up and vaulted, but gradually, over the months that followed, Anne heard creeping into Jasper’s voice a new wistfulness. A softening toward his younger self, a revisiting of his childhood town and family members he had not seen in a long while. A revived interest in his sister in Los Angeles and his niece and nephew there, whom he sought to visit and befriend. A seed grew within Jasper, and Anne knew this man well enough to sense it growing. His wish to be a father. More than that: his determination to be one.
It was his condescension toward Anne which enabled Jazz, she realized, to edge away from her. She came to believe, when he finally left two years later, that Jasper’s departure had begun that night, in their apartment. The actual details — the chef Sophie, where they met, how their affair began — hardly seemed important. It was not a new passion that Jasper sought, exactly; it was parenthood. By definition, that was an adventure Jasper had to have without Anne.
19
By early evening, Tricia was rested and ready to wander. And Anne, having been to church, was eager for secular pleasures.
‘They came with my bags. Some grouchy, swarthy guy out of the Godfather movies. Al Pacino’s brother. We couldn’t understand each other.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ Anne said. ‘Sometimes a language barrier is a fine thing. Isn’t that what they call a meet-cute?’
‘It could have been.’ Tricia slung a yellow leather purse over her shoulder, which Anne touched, admiringly, and as they headed down the stairs and into Venice Anne noticed something: her sister was walking straighter. Looking lighter. The travel weariness had been just that. ‘But actually,’ Tricia continued, ‘I’m spoken for.’ Her voice sounded almost girlish.
‘What? Who? Who speaks for you?’
‘I’ll get to that,’ Trish said coyly. ‘Over dinner. First, what about you? Are you seeing anyone?’
They wove in and out of shops and tourists as they spoke, falling into a sisterly rhythm they hadn’t enjoyed for too long.
‘I’ve always found that such an odd verb. Seeing.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t be such a professor. Are you?’
‘Well. I saw a nice enough man getting out of my bed a few times last spring, if that’s what you mean.’ Another sororal eye roll.
‘So? Who was he?’
Anne shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter, honestly. Tim. He was a consultant. But it was fairly mercenary on both our parts, that’s all.’
‘Mercenary?’
‘I just mean we were both in it for the sex. Which was fine. There wasn’t much more to it than that.’ Anne had embarked on this brief affair chiefly so she could tell concerned friends that she had. To put some distance, or at least a body, between herself and memories of Jazz. It had not been especially effective.
‘You’re a cold fish, sister.’ Tricia peered in the window of one of countless glass-offering stores: little glass elephants, swans, giraffes.
‘I am, at times. I looked up restaurants, there’s one nearby that sounded good, and not a tourist trap. Are you hungry?’
‘Starving. So what about your cruise? Any romance there?’
Thoughts of the Swedish captain and the German purser drifted across Anne’s mind. ‘Sadly, not.’
‘No millionaire widowers you could hook up with?’
‘Well, there were a few of those.’ Anne laughed. ‘But they tended to have overgrown ears, and wandering hands. And hold forth at length about Julius Caesar.’ She gave a brief comical sketch of Winter. ‘Maybe Greta got lucky. But no, I resisted the millionaires’ advances.’
‘Huh. And you’re supposed to be so smart!’
‘Book smart.’ Anne corrected her. ‘Not the other kind, that matters more.’
It was an old quotation from their mother. When it became clear that Anne’s intelligence would be her means of escaping from home — then, as with her beauty, her mother had to consider it a major character flaw. Chère Irène tolerated her older daughter’s academic success — a PhD from one of the nation’s most famous universities, teaching positions, the publications of her books –only by insisting it came at the expense of the life achievements that were, for a woman, more important: marriage and family. That this view was held by a woman who herself had little warmth for her husband and no obvious sense of fulfilment from motherhood was beside the point. Irène had been consistently dismissive about Anne’s long unmarried partnership with Jasper — whom she met just twice, on strained occasions — and it was a source of acute distress to Anne that her mother lived long enough to know that Jasper and she split up. At the family’s last Thanksgiving all together, a grim meal at their father’s assisted living facility served in the shadow of Irène’s diseased wheezing and Frank’s agitated, circular confusions, Irène said
succinctly to her daughter, ‘I never understood why you didn’t marry. It said something, I think. About his intentions.’
This was delivered with a smugness she did not bother to paper over with pretended kindness. It was as though, in Jasper’s leaving of Anne, Irène’s suspicion of him had, like a long-term bond, finally and with great profit, cashed out.
Anne returned to New York on the first flight out the next morning. Tricia drove her to the airport before anyone was awake, when the Detroit air around them was still icy and dark. ‘Well, now she can die happy,’ was Anne’s sole tart comment to her sister on what had happened, and though Tricia sometimes tried to excuse away their mother’s cruelty to Anne, in this instance she could not say a word.
20
Anne and Tricia sat together at a lively canalside restaurant, elbows brushing their neighbors’, a mixture of languages peppered over plates of silver-bright anchovy and lightly fried coils of calamari. Tricia thought fussiness over food was pretentious, preferring not to stop to notice the flavors and textures they were presented, and rolling her eyes if Anne did. So Anne savored silently, then said, after a salty mouthful:
‘All right. Your turn.’
‘Well!’ Tricia brightened. ‘I’ve met someone.’
‘Mmm. That’s very good . . . news.’
‘Yes. It is.’ Again, Tricia sounded defensive, as if Anne had suggested the opposite. ‘He’s a nice guy. Salt of the earth. For once in my life, I’m not dating an asshole.’
It wouldn’t be polite to agree, but in the ten years since Tricia’s divorce from a smart engineer with a serious drinking problem, as she largely single-handedly raised their son Mitchell, Tricia had shown a consistent knack for locating men whose interest in her was cursory. At best, they offered company for baseball games with Mitchell, and presumably sexual companionship for Tricia, but they had never been men you hoped would stick around.
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