In memory of Alf Salo
CONTENTS
PART ONE
The Mason Estate
PART TWO
The Gregoriov Bakery
PART THREE
The Yellow Room
PART FOUR
The Top of the World
PART FIVE
The Other Season
Coda
Notes
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
• • •
The Mason Estate
In the moment after Robert Mason’s condom broke he rolled off me, propped himself on his elbow, and said, “What you do doesn’t help anybody.” He was a four-time All-American diving champion with political aspirations, Jewish, proficient in Japanese, and a recent head page to the Department of Justice. We were both twenty-one years old. When I didn’t answer, distracted by feelings of pregnancy and damnation, Robert got out of bed. He covered his magnificence with a shirt and went out to sleep in another room.
We were spending a weekend at the Mason estate, a compound in northern New England where his father, a tycoon in the tire industry, exercised his dogs. The house had many bedrooms—I was in one, Robert in another, his sister and her fiancé in a third, seven more going empty—and a large back territory, full of trees and a small body of water where one could see that summer had come. I had the impression that the summer I saw here over the lake was just a corner of a larger summer, one that stretched over the entire hemisphere, and that it was possible for me to float freely through it, riding the light wherever.
It was May, and I was interested in getting all my light in one nightless season. Then hanging on to it. That’s what I needed, I thought, a lesson in either light-making, or light-keeping. To fulfill graduation requirements for the art major, I had submitted a paper on urban landscapes and a few paintings of buildings. The buildings I painted were gray and wintry, pocked by rows of black windows. I had read of a man who was painting with only the color yellow—he lived in the north of Norway. The artist colony where he worked had offered me a room for the summer, as part of a painting apprenticeship program. That same week, Robert had asked me to join him in Japan after graduation. I had promptly turned Norway down. The Arctic Apprenticeship Committee argued that the master painter would accept assistants for this summer only, that I was missing a rare opportunity. I felt it was a rarer opportunity to spend the summer in love, in Shinjuku.
Now that Robert had dismissed me, I had no reason to go to Shinjuku. Robert had been invited by JANIC, the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation; I had been invited by Robert. I scrambled for alternatives. Maybe I could go north, maybe they’d still have me. Maybe I could learn something about the world’s brightness from that man and his yellow paint. Maybe I could learn to be alone.
The pharmaceutical attendant who sold us Plan B heard more of Robert’s voice than I had over the course of the weekend. His silence confused his sister, who was soon to be married, and was very much in love with Timothy, her patient, bug-eyed life partner. Back at the estate, I helped myself to fruit salad. Janet and Timothy offered me napkins, water. They tilted their heads at me, looking confused and a little like Colombian lovebirds. I shrugged back, admitting that I did not know why I had been brought to their house or why I was still in it.
We heard the sound of Robert diving into the lake. He was in the habit of diving twice a day, once for form and once for breath-control drills, before and after lunch. I’d had enough silence and fruit salad and wanted to make him talk. I folded my napkin, walked out to the water, and jumped in.
He really did look happy to see me when he came up, gasping and shooting snot from his nose into his hands, and then grabbing me by the shoulders. It looked like he was about to say something. He changed his mind and went under again. He came up with a distant expression that was half Rembrandt and half Marine, shook the water out of his buzz cut, and told me we were heading inside.
His blond leg hair was tangled with weeds and algae. As we walked across the backyard, I wanted to pin him down and shave his legs, especially as we passed the outgrown family sandbox with its rakes that looked like big razors. We got to the back door and he took off his shorts. Keeping both parts of my bathing suit on, I joined him under the outdoor shower. Robert Mason Sr. had installed the stone floor himself in a little ring just big enough for two right and two left feet. Robert Jr. took it upon himself to soap us both down.
He and I had been dating for three months, during which we’d had sex infinity times and imagined a Jewish wedding. We would graduate in a month, and I’d believed that we would go out into the world as partners and live in it until we died. Japan, marriage, brises, bar mitzvai. Gradually, over the last three weeks, the fact of our being not merely incompatible, but enemies, had snuck up on this dream.
There, in my dreamy, birth-controlled stupor, as I watched the shower stream down the length of him, it was mystifying to me—the way he was essentially unkind, in the way only heroes can be; the insane thing he’d said, and the insane moment he’d said it. The shower water was warmer than the lake, and I began to feel blood again, and I began to shiver with anger, which he interpreted as a chill, turning off the water, rubbing us both with one big white towel, and leading us up to the patio where we could dry in deck chairs in the sun.
“Don’t be angry, Frances,” he said, finally looking at me, and meaning it. “I’m sorry about last night. What can I do?”
“You help people.”
“All Masons do,” he said. “It’s in my blood.”
Robert was an exceptionally pale young man whose veins showed at his temples. I wondered how much blood he had.
“That’s the real problem here,” he continued. I sat up from the leaning deck chair, wanting very much to hear the real problem. “It’s where we come from. If your mother decorated, let’s say, the interiors of hospitals, we might have more to say to each other. If your father—”
“Who said I was going to help people?” I said, leaving my parents out of it. “I am going to make paintings using the color yellow, Bob.”
I had never called him Bob before.
“That looney tunes gig up in Lapland?” he asked.
“I’m not coming to Japan.”
“In that case”—he paused—“I can’t help you.” He squinted at the trees in the distance, as if keeping his eyes on the future.
• • •
Janet drove us down from the house at the end of the weekend. Being from Manhattan, I had never learned to drive a car. She said we would be stopping in Providence for burritos and adjusted her rearview mirror. We drove down the interstate.
I drew up a map in my mind. Robert and I held separate tickets to Japan: the Masons’ frequent-flyer miles had put Robert on a direct flight, and I had assembled a discounted multi-leg itinerary through the backlogs of the Student Travel Association. It didn’t seem likely that the STA would offer flights to the Bodø Airport of Arctic Norway. And even the most inventive flight path wouldn’t help: in the weeks since I’d turned it down, the apprenticeship had surely been filled. I was going home now, apparently indefinitely, and wherever I went next, there would be no more Robert Masons. I saw how everything that was about to happen would be controlled by its own door. The car door would open and let me out, the car door would shut behind me, the door to my parents’ apartment would open and let me in, I would sleep there, and in the morning, as soon as I opened the door and went out, Robert would no longer be anywhere in the world. I was about to cry. I bit the skin of my inner cheek and tried to think about rocks and lizards.
We parked the car at a meter. Timothy was rubbing his hands together and saying, “Gonna get chicken.” Crossing the road to the
Burrito Barn, I watched Robert ahead of me in the intersection, performing his slow, weekend swagger for the cars at the next red light.
The Burrito Barn had no seating, so we ate on the road. Janet steered with one hand. I hadn’t noticed the pill’s aftertaste until it clashed with my chipotle sauce. When the burritos were finished and the tinfoil was bunched up and collected in the gross paper bags, there, in the backseat of the Land Rover, I let myself fall against him. I wanted to feel his solid shoulder one more time.
Robert petted my hair. He stroked my cheek, and when his fingers dragged down to my chin he pinched it. We nuzzled our heads together, in the spirit of being ex–true loves. I missed our true love. I hated him for his shoulders. My stomach burned and kept burning down I-95. Half an hour later, somewhere in New Jersey, Janet pulled over to the side of the road. Robert opened the door, carried my bag to the bus stop, and dropped it onto the curb. He pointed to one end of the road and said the bus would be coming from that way. He thanked me for coming, got back in the car, kicked the trash bag to the side where I had been sitting, shut the door, waved through the window, and went.
• • •
I looked down the road.
After an hour, a bus came.
• • •
I got home to find my sister climbing out the window. She had my mother’s long legs—half a foot longer than mine. I climbed out after her. The fire escape had always been our only hope for a tree house, but now we hardly fit. We sat with our legs tangled, on slats just over the tops of the sidewalk trees. We took off our shoes, squeezed our calves through the slats, and let our feet hang between the branches. We were six stories high.
My sister was grinning at her toes. I assumed she would explain her delight, but she let out only a long, lazy sigh. I wanted to tell her that it was over. I wanted to tell her that I felt jilted, half pregnant, heartbroken—but Sarah was preoccupied. She looked out over the trees. I saw her eyes following each passing car, as if she were counting them, lulling herself into a daze. There was no point in spoiling her lullaby with the Mason nightmare.
I left her to her joy and climbed back through the window to see my parents, who tended to be as miserable as I felt that night.
My mother wanted to know how the weekend had gone. I never gossiped with my mother, she never knew anything about whom I kissed or when I kissed them. When she asked me how things were going, I generally answered, “Good.”
“Not that well,” I said. My father burst out from the kitchen. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew he was no good from the night we were standing on Harrison Street, and we’d all just seen How to Succeed in Business, and I asked him how he liked it, and he said, ‘Your daughter has very talented friends.’ I should have told him, ‘Go blow,’” my father said.
My father grew up on Flatbush Avenue, in a Brooklyn from another time, where his parents dressed gorgeously and drank unapologetically. My mother grew up on the only Jewish cow farm in Vermont.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
My mother asked again what had happened. I didn’t think I could answer fully, though for the first time I wanted to, because when she was my age she wasn’t having sex, she was milking cows.
The most I could say was, “I don’t want to see him again,” which was true.
And then it was time for bed. Our apartment unfurled itself. It was a night-blooming plant of some kind—the sofa bed opening up for my parents, filling the living room until it was nothing but a man and a woman in bed, with no room left, the foot of the mattress reaching just to the knob of the front door. In the bedroom, I crawled into my bottom bunk. The top belonged to my sister, who attended New York University and lived at home, but rarely slept there. She was a year younger than me, and in love.
There was no question that her boyfriend’s bed was more comfortable. It was simply larger. Everything about my family was small. It was just the four of us. We had no first cousins, no living grandparents. Physically, I had always been small. My father had been chubby as a child, had been teased for it, and now ate almost only ketchup. My mother had been long-haired and go-go-boot-wearing in the sixties, but was now short-haired and flat-shoed and ate almost only apples. We crawled into our beds like mice into holes, holes just our size. All night long, my mother would wake up and pee. My parents’ pajamas were stored in the one bedroom, the one they had given to their daughters, and my father would fall asleep in his clothes on the sofa bed before coming in, middle of the night, to change. I pretended to sleep and not look at his legs when he took off his pants. Then we would all fall asleep again, in our nearby holes, and the apartment would accommodate us though we asked too much of it.
• • •
As a child, my father had wanted to be a doctor. He followed the track faithfully: Brooklyn Borough Science Fair, AP chemistry, pre-med major. Nothing deterred his interest, until at nineteen he received a sudden rush of praise. His molecular genetics professor raved about the precision of his double helix illustrations. His organic chemistry professor photocopied my father’s line-angle representations to distribute as study materials. My father started to understand his passions as distinct from his classmates’, from the sea of students pursuing identical paths. He loved the way the gallbladder had the shape and color of a cactus leaf. He hated the way his course textbooks depicted the esophagus as a rigatoni noodle. He discovered that he had a talent for drawing organs the way he wanted to see them, focusing on their harsh complexity. He discovered the Association of Medical Illustrators. He believed he’d found a way to contribute his best to the medical world.
His friends progressed from pre-med to medical school. He entered a biological illustration graduate program for CAAHEP accreditation. His friends called him “lucky” with affection and disapproval: his program would take only two years. He earned his first paycheck illustrating a cross section of the human palm. His illustrations were bold. He never redrew a line. His friends, having completed their studies, and over the years having completed their residencies and having started their practices, didn’t need to consult his good work. They had long since put their textbooks aside. He’d never met anyone who’d seen his illustrations. Thirty years into his work, my father couldn’t say what his excellence had earned him.
His drafting desk was a slab of wood resting over his clothes drawers, in my bedroom. Scattered over the desktop lay the empty cardboard cartons of graphite crayon sets—the crayons themselves lying out one by one with broken tips—an X-Acto knife and its gleaming spare blades, stacks of sketchbooks, rolls of masking tape, a half dozen mugs. My father, his sixty-year-old head full of eternally growing hair, liked to stand at his desk with all his drawings out, smiling, talking about how miserable they made him.
How miserable they made him. How many cups of coffee he drank a day. How mad he made other men with his full head of blond hair. I believed my father’s love of life was demonstrated by the coffee he drank—rabid, charged, sickening, acidic, addictive. Nobody had a bigger built-in smile than my father, though his mouth lent itself equally to extraordinary rage. At breakfast every Sunday, he asked me if his pictures were still good.
A diner we found one such morning was playing Ella Fitzgerald, so he wanted to stay. He spread ketchup over the omelet we were sharing, put his knife down, gazed out the window, then turned back, picked up his fork, scraped the ketchup off the top, and ate it alone, without egg.
“The sound is especially good in here,” he said. “It sounds like they’re playing live music.”
Ella was singing “Cheek to Cheek” in 1956.
Nowhere was my father more at home than in a diner, in the company of waitresses and condiments. He was the most American person I knew. Perhaps my mother was the least, with her specific intelligences, her tininess, her incredible talent for self-restraint.
A toddler ran past our table waving a bendy straw. We laughed, and then my father got wretched. His flaring nostrils signaled the turn.
“No solution,
” he began.
I ate and let him go on.
“I did it to myself,” he said. “I could have been a podiatrist. Instead, I draw feet. It’s not science, and it’s not art. It’s just pictures. Students don’t look at them. Doctors definitely don’t look at them. How am I supposed to keep making these things when nobody cares if they exist?”
“They’re gorgeous,” I said. They were.
“What does it matter if you do what you love, if what you love doesn’t matter?”
The waitress wanted to know if the coffee should be refilled.
He said to her, “What I do doesn’t matter.”
She asked, “What?”
I said, “Yes, please.”
“I am sixty years old,” he said to me, while she leaned, patient, voluptuous, over our table, her pot filling his cup, her hair like mine—thin, curly, getting long—and it was such a relief to have three of us at the table for a moment, another innocent party, allowing us to pause, while a French family at the next table consulted their maps.
I wanted to be able to speak to him happily, to show him the way I was when I was away from him, which was happy, which was how he wanted me to be. I had a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Eternal Husband with me and showed him its bright pink cover, to change the subject.
“Bought it for the title?” was his first joke. He flipped the book over. There was only a single line of text on the back: “The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.” We looked at the quote together from opposite sides of the table.
• • •
My mother keeps a sea monster in five porcelain parts ( ^ ^ ^ /) on her office desk, beside a row of long-living orchids. She works at a small interior design company. On a shelf beside her upholstery samples, she keeps a photograph of my father making a duck face with his lips, a photograph of me as an eight-year-old in a purple summer camp T-shirt, and one of my sister, age eleven, holding a pizza box on Lexington Avenue. The photos are displayed in reversible, clear-plastic frames that hold four images but take up the counter space of two. The thing that my mother likes most, personally and professionally, is the efficient use of space.
The Sunlit Night Page 1