But I really wanted to know, so I persisted. “Do you feel Gray understands you?” I was visiting Miriam and her husband and kids in Los Angeles and had been washing the breakfast dishes, but turned off the water to hear her answer. Miriam shared little with me and we rarely found time for real conversation.
“Understands what?” she asked distractedly while packing the children’s lunch boxes. A juice box in each, turkey sandwiches with mayo for Dylan, a dash of mustard spread on Shane’s bread. Carrot sticks for both. She wrinkled her forehead, already wary that this might be yet another tedious conversation her mother was going to engage her in for way too long and that it was going to make her late for her job at the film studio in Hollywood, where she lugs seventy-five-pound cameras up into high and dangerous places.
“You know, the important things,” I answered. “The things that make you who you are.”
“Shit, Mom. I’m happy if Gray understands we need milk and remembers to buy it on his way home from work.”
“Come on, Miriam, you know what I mean. The things that make you unique. Your essence. Do you feel he sees you in that way?” What I was really wondering was, had my daughter found this thing that I’d been searching for?
She stared at me, rubbing her lower back, which has given Miriam trouble since her youthful horse-riding days and makes her concerned about how long she’ll be able to continue her well-paying, but physically demanding studio job. “Mom, I really hope he doesn’t see me. Mostly, when I’m not working or doing laundry or paying bills, I want to be left alone. I hope he doesn’t see that I need to shave my legs or that I’m falling asleep while he talks to me at dinner. My essence? Jesus, I’m a cranky middle-aged woman with stretch marks, and I hope his eyes are so bad he can’t see me. Or, God forbid, want to have sex with me.”
“Oh, sweetie,” I said. I took the SpongeBob lunch pail from her hands and put my arms around her. “I know how tired you are. But you are so beautiful. And smart. And definitely not middle-aged.” As usual, Miriam allowed only the briefest of hugs between us.
She said, “It’s okay, Mom. Gray and I are happy together. There’s nothing for you to worry about. But the kids and I have to leave now. I’ll see you tonight. Don’t let the boys watch TV until they finish their homework.” My two grandsons, Dylan, aged four, and Shane, six, each gave me a quick kiss before Miriam shepherded them out the door to the minivan parked under the palm tree in front of their house. She dropped them at school on her way to work. When I visited Los Angeles, I picked them up, so they didn’t have to go to afterschool day care. It felt good that I could help Miriam in this small way.
“Bye, darlings,” I called to Dylan and Shane.
Miriam’s twin brother Evan still lives in New York, where he works in the admissions department of Fordham Law School. Evan is gay, a fact that surprised me very little when he came out at the beginning of college (although I heard he had some issues with his father, a man on the macho side of the gender spectrum. Seth probably thinks I caused Evan’s homosexuality by being an overbearing mother). When it became legal in New York, Evan married Ira. He and Ira seem to have real chemistry, but it is hard to make out what is underneath all that flirty, bantering humor between them. Ira is almost never serious and Evan seems to work hard to keep up. Does Ira get my dear, sensitive boy? Or is it just banter and wit? Who knows? Certainly not me.
The one who I had great hope for in the Being Seen department was my younger son, Joseph. After Walt died and Miriam and Evan went away to college, it was just the two of us in that big house. While he was growing up, we would sit at the dinner table and discuss life and books and music and, I suppose you’d call it, the soul. He had inherited his father’s excellent mind. He was also a fine communicator, which I like to think he got from me. I’d always hoped that he’d find someone who appreciated what he offered, his depth. And yet, who is Joseph engaged to? After all these years of my waiting and meeting several wonderful young women he brought home, he recently became engaged to Dr. Heidi Mortensen—in my opinion, a surprising choice. She is a resident at Johns Hopkins in ophthalmology, where Joseph is in the middle of his own residency in emergency medicine. They also live a life that seems to leave little time for introspection or examination of each other’s feelings. When they aren’t working, they are usually tuning up their fancy road bikes and, heads down, riding ungodly amounts of miles through the Maryland countryside.
Who sees my son Joseph these days? I wonder and think back to when he was growing up, the two of us talking until all hours about life and death and what makes us who we are. He was full of questions about his father, who died when he was so young. Friends and colleagues from the lab told Joseph how brilliant his father had been, how Walt was a luminary in his field of physics. Where, Joseph wondered, did all that knowledge go after his father died? Are particles of his intelligence still floating around the atmosphere somewhere? Have these particles of knowledge been converted into other living matter? We used to speak about those things when he was a boy.
I wonder if he asks those kinds of questions now. I’ve watched Heidi, the flawless Scandinavian girl he is to marry next year, lean and muscular as a greyhound. She doesn’t seem the type to ponder the afterlife or to spend much time on introspection. She’s too busy with her work and riding that damn bicycle. Even though she is to be a doctor for the eyes, I doubt that she sees my son Joseph.
But this is my story: not Miriam’s nor Evan’s nor Joseph’s. Not my father’s, either. As I got older, all I could do was wonder when, or if, I would experience this great communion with a man. I liked men, you see, and, though independent in most things, felt incomplete without one. Of course, I have always had dear women friends, like Marnie and Rachel, good friends with whom I share my story. Yet even after two marriages, and more men sharing my bed than I care to admit to, I still hungered to be seen.
Of course there was still you, Elliot. And, even in my fifties, with Evan and Miriam in their mid-twenties and already well launched, and Joseph getting close to high school, you were on my mind—with greater frequency and urgency than ever. Despite earlier vows, I had not exorcised you. I was feeling on the downward slope of life, watching the months and days hurtle by at an ever more shocking speed. That, and Walt’s early death, made me anxiously wonder whether I’d ever find this connection. As usual, as soon as February rolled around, I waited for the annual package from you, which year after year you sent from New York. A book, a bracelet, a decoration for the house—your gifts made me feel seen and bless you, you never forgot. I imagined you thinking about me every year as my birthday drew near, putting in time and effort as from the cornucopia of Manhattan shops, you selected just the right thing. For you always did. When the parcel arrived, it would contain something that showed how well you knew me.
“Have you read the latest Philip Roth?” you asked, the year you sent Sabbath’s Theater. “I hope you haven’t already bought it. You are going to love it. I can’t wait to talk about it with you.”
“I haven’t,” I said. “But it’s on fire in my hands, I can’t wait to start it. What’s it about?” We had discovered Philip Roth together when we were in college. We felt we’d grown up with him.
“It’s brilliant,” you said. “You’ll hate the guy, Mickey Sabbath. He’s a real schmuck, but what a riveting schmuck. I don’t know how Roth does what he does. I think it’s his best so far. And,” you added conspiratorially, “it’s filthy. Soooo dirty. You know, Drenka, the female character in this book? She actually reminds me of you.”
“Me? How?” I asked.
“She’s really sexy. Yeah, the more I think about it, Rocket, the more I see you in naughty Drenka. She fucks four men in one day!”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “That happens to me a lot.” Each evening, as I tore through the book, I was delighted and shocked that you saw me as sexy, maybe even filthy, Drenka. I read and reread the scandalous scenes, remembering how sex between us, years ago in the hotel in
San Francisco, had also been filthy. Once I’d got over you hiding me in the closet that first night, and you got over whatever it was that kept you from getting a hard-on, we’d grown wanton, willing to try anything that occurred to either of us. How delicious to remember those nights and to know you remembered our desire as well. When I closed the Roth book, I placed it on the shelf where I kept your gifts, not filing it among my other volumes. Since college, we’d had our secret Roth code, telling each other that someone was a Portnoy or a Nathan. Now we’d added to that private language. I was a Drenka, a licentious woman, who would try anything in bed.
Then a new phase of our relationship began, based on this very love of literature. You wrote a long, emotion-packed letter to me. When either of us was hashing out a dilemma, we still wrote one another longhand letters, four or five pages laying out the problem. As it happened, I’d been thinking of you especially pensively that day, so when I got your emotional letter, I took it as an omen.
Joseph and I still lived in the house in the Oakland Hills, looking out at the view that had brought Walt such happiness. It was too big for the two of us, but we both loved the place. I worked part-time after Walt’s death, as well as spending many hours volunteering at Joseph’s school. I took trips, often with Marnie, who also loved travel and adventure, but whose husband had grown afraid of flying. I didn’t resist when friends occasionally introduced me to men they or their husbands knew, but there had been no one who interested me. Joseph became the center of my emotional life. I was uncomfortably aware of this and tried not to smother my son, to give him freedom to rebel, but he never did. Joseph was far too easy a teenager, I feared, trying too hard to please me. On that autumn afternoon when I snatched your long letter from my mailbox, I made tea for myself and sat in my sunny kitchen to read it. I still drink that same tea, a sweet bergamot I love; its scent fills the air wherever I am.
Writing in that fountain pen and dark blue ink you’d always used, you began by saying you’d come to a weighty decision. Although you were still relatively young, you no longer wanted to practice law. You were going to retire. Your practice, beginning with the massive antitrust suit in San Francisco, had been followed by a series of even more illustrious achievements. Although you did not say this immodestly, you wanted me to know that you had handled many important cases for your New York firm, and brought in an increasing amount of new business. This meant you’d generated a progressively large share of the firm’s revenue. You were the youngest lawyer to be made partner in the firm’s over one-hundred-year history. As a vested partner in this very successful firm, money seemed to flow endlessly your way. Unfortunately, you wrote, little satisfaction remained in either the money or the success.
You said you’d had an epiphany. You’d come to realize that the activities which had led to you being made partner at such a young age, had been largely immoral. Looking back at your twenty-five-year law career, you did not feel proud of some of the cases you’d fought and won. This gnawed at your gut. Your desire to be a good, no, a great, lawyer, had led you into ethically murky territory. Although the time spent clerking for the Supreme Court justice had been intellectually exhilarating, a consequence of that experience had been the outsized respect for the law you’d imbibed. Law had become your religion, just as it had been of the athlete-scholar who’d been your hero. You looked back at your ambitious career at the firm in New York. Your successes had made you a rising star, and you were counsel for important cases with precedent-setting verdicts. Attracting clients of national and international importance had eventually clouded your moral clarity. Devotion to this Religion of the Law had caused you to lose your way.
I put down the letter. There had been no indication that this was coming. You’d always seemed confident of your professional decisions. My heart pounded with pride for you. I felt as if you were rediscovering that boy you had been, the boy with a social conscience. But there was more.
Your greatest regret had been serving as lead counsel for the international conglomerate that made, among its many products, baby formula. I remembered that case and that I’d read, in one of my liberal magazines, how poor African women unknowingly mixed the powdered formula with contaminated water, usually the only water available to them. At the time, you defended your client’s right to market their product. You claimed women had a choice and they chose not to breastfeed. Now, as you reread the court documents, you were sickened at thinking about the preventable deaths of babies drinking contaminated milk, when it was clear that breast milk was the safer option. You knew that you’d been partially culpable. In the past, you’d maintained that because your big wins generated huge profits, your firm had been able to take on pro bono work of great social import. But now, you admitted that you’d closed your eyes to certain ugly facts.
You wrote that you were finished with it. There was no need to work as a lawyer ever again. At fifty-five, you’d still be receiving a handsome check every year. Your firm generously provided fully vested partners with this profit sharing, even after their retirement. You had enough money to live comfortably, and you wanted out. You were through practicing law. To the surprise of the firm and everyone else you knew, you’d quit. In the next few months, you’d tie up loose ends, but that was all. You wanted to change your life, to explore a dream neglected since boyhood.
You outlined a book you wanted to write. It was to be a novel exploring guilt, influenced by the very questions you’d been asking yourself. Instead of the present, however, the setting would be the 1960s—soon after the McCarthy era. The narrator would be a lawyer (much like yourself). This fictional lawyer found himself regretting the work he had done for the government—hunting down and prosecuting communists and communist sympathizers. Concurrently, the novel would tell the story of a doomed love affair between the lawyer and a young woman sick with cancer. You wanted to weave together themes of this ambitious lawyer’s professional guilt with his personal guilt toward the lover and his inability to fully commit.
Well. Here I smiled a bit. I’d always thought you were meant for a creative life, not grubbing away in an office representing business conglomerates. Since your boyhood, I’d seen this in you. Hadn’t we grown up wanting to change the world? I was surprised, but admired your decision to chuck your successful career and follow your passion. I completely believed in you. I thought there was not a thing on earth that Elliot Pine could not do. But the subject matter made me queasy, especially the love affair part. After all, hadn’t I been part of your betrayal of Meredith? Then, at the very end of your letter, you said there was a favor you wanted to ask of me. You hoped I would help you. Could we discuss this in a phone call? I folded the thick letter, stuffing it back into the envelope, and picked up my now lukewarm tea. What on earth could I do to help you?
I called the next afternoon. I knew Lilly would be at her gallery.
“Well, this is exciting,” I began. “A whole new life.”
“Do you like it?” you asked immediately. “Can you see it as a novel?”
“Elliot, I think you can tell a great story. And lawyers are good writers. But what you’re doing takes courage. Not many people would walk away from a law practice like yours.”
“I’m serious about this book. I don’t plan to write it as a therapy project.”
“Okay, I believe you. But what can I do?”
“I want you to read it. We’ve discussed literature our whole lives. I want to send you chapters and have you comment on them. But I want you to be honest. Don’t spare me.”
I told you I would think about it, but I wasn’t really sure how I could help you. That night, I lay in bed and wondered why you wanted my opinion so much. It would be tricky to read about your deception to Meredith. What if I showed up as one of the characters? Maybe you were trying to expiate your guilt toward me as well. Could I be a dispassionate reader? I wasn’t sure, Elliot. Still, I found my excitement for the project growing. This would be something we shared. You and me. I phoned you and
said I’d give it a try.
“That’s wonderful, Judith. Everything is falling in place. Thank you. I hope you’re ready, because I’m going to be sending you some work really soon.”
“You’ve started writing?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But I rented a cottage. Lillian helped me find some great carpenters, electricians, painters. They’re doing a fantastic job. It’s going to be a beautiful studio.” I shook my head at the other end of the line. Just like Elliot, I thought, nothing but the best. Not one word published, but still a writer’s studio, and from the sound of it, a charming place in the woods near his village on the Hudson.
“I’d be honored to read what you’ve written,” I said. “But I’m not an expert. I’m no professional editor or anything.”
“I know, I understand,” you replied, “but you’re the reader I want. If you like what I write, I’ll know it’s okay.” Then there was a pause. “You know, it’s exciting, but I’m actually terrified to begin and have you read it.”
“Elliot, I’ll take this seriously, but there’s no reason to be terrified. I’m on your side, remember?”
“Yeah, I know. But you can’t imagine how much this means to me. The writing.” Then you changed the subject. “I’ve put a telephone in the studio. You can call me here any time. When we’re just catching up, I think we should talk by phone. Not write letters. I don’t want you to edit my letters,” you said and laughed. “Mail for the work and phone calls for everything else. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said and wrote down the number at the studio, thinking how serious this really was for you, giving up everything familiar. You’d practiced law for over twenty-five years, always been successful at it. Of course you were nervous. “Tell me more about what you need from me,” I said, trying to be a good social worker, as well as a friend.
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