The light changed. Traffic halted. She crossed the street, and Leonard walked faster. He began to run and just as the light commenced to change he dashed across the street, evoking a blare of horns like a trumpet blast. He ran, faster, easily, not thinking of anything except the slap of his sneakers against the pavement. An elderly man in a checked cap who was putting out bags of garbage said in a weary voice, “Go ahead, kill yourself,” and a pretty blond girl in pink bellbottoms said as he said past, “Hey, love, what’s your rush?”
He went on, arms pumping, legs going, heart knocking, and there she was ahead of him, standing on the next street corner. He put on a burst of speed, skidded up to her, dove past her, whirled around, blocked her path—she was about to cross Irving Place—and stood reeling on the curbstone in front of her, as if he were drunk or on skates, feeling for the first time in weeks wholly himself, wholly alive. He laughed down at her, and then arms wildly flailing, lost his balance and fell into the gutter, but caught himself at once and rocketed upwards. He put his hands on his hips, shook his head, took a deep stabilizing breath, all the while grinning down at her. She stood perfectly still, staring. He sighed. He reached up and gently removed her sunglasses.
Her eyes, which were gray-blue, were shocked. “Leonard!” she said. “My God. What are you doing?”
“Oh,” he said, “sorry! I wanted … uh …” He blissfully smiled. He thought gaily, Why, of course! This is what’s meant. It all seemed clear to him. He laughed down at her thin, astonished face, and when she stepped off the curb he took her arm, holding it high above the elbow so that she couldn’t slip away. She offered no resistance, simply went along beside him with his large hand clamped onto her arm, the sunglasses dangling from his other hand. They mutely walked west on Sixteenth Street until he said, “Coffee!”
She stopped and pulled her arm away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed. “It doesn’t have to be coffee, we could have lunch. Or a glass of wine? There must be someplace—”
He wanted to ply her with food, or drink, wine, jewels, flowers, silks, furs, anything, anything. In his empty head and heart it had all at once struck him, at that very moment when she, standing still at the corner of Sixteenth Street, had turned her head to the left and he had seen her calm, watching profile and the line of her pretty neck. “Liz!” he’d thought, very clearly, with absolute certainty. It all seemed clear to him. Into the void he carried within him, had carried now for more months than he could remember, a spark had been struck, as if a ray of sunlight, reflected from the metal cornerpiece of her sunglasses, had ignited the dusty and vaporous emptiness inside him and with the resonance of an explosion, a sort of internal va-va-vroom, a tongue of flame had leaped up, setting everything fully ablaze. He knew it now, why hadn’t he seen it before? That he loved her, loved her, and he would find someplace, a bar, a restaurant, a coffee shop, where he could sit down and explain to her rationally, seriously, logically, calmly, how he loved her: it had come to all at once.
“What is it?” he asked.
She rubbed her arm and said frowning, “You were hurting,” and then with her fist shut, rotated her wrist. There on the tender skin of her white inner arm were the marks of his fingers, three greedy red blotches, already turned faintly blue.
“I? I did that?” He stuttered. “I’m so-s-so sorry!” She looked petulant. But what was wrong with her? Couldn’t she see how he felt? Surely it must be there, clearly displayed on his face, that he had been transformed, and because of her.
She was impassive. He said, muttering, “I didn’t mean to. I’m very sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s nothing. Only you scared me to death. I thought …”
“You thought …?” He bent his head, prompting.
“My mother’s been in the hospital. I thought you’d heard something, been sent to find me.” She looked away, down the street with its brownstone houses and struggling city trees. A small breeze blew her hair across her face and she blinked and brushed it back. Her green dress had a plain round neck with a small bow at the center.
He sighed. “No.” So that was it. Her mother was ill, a worry. “No, that wasn’t it. It was just such a tremendous coincidence, seeing you. And you never come into the city. Do you?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Not very often.”
He thought how, standing there, she seemed perfectly self-contained. She was a careful person, the kind of person who could manage money, live on little, have a savings account, think about insurance and taxes, all the things he was so bad at doing, for he didn’t care about money, never had, only wanted not to think about it, although when he had it he didn’t mind spending it. He felt he knew her. She would be thoughtful and prudent, and he looked at her fondly, as if they’d been married for fifty years.
He said gently, “Let’s get some coffee,” and fastened his hand carefully around her elbow and gently steered her down the street, remembering all at once that he had no money. Or practically no money. Enough for tolls and gas on the way home. He could, in his mind’s eye, see his wallet, with its neatly folded four one dollar bills. But coffee, there was surely enough for that.
They turned north and went on strolling up the street together, but because she seemed so wooden and resistant, he dropped his hand and punched his fist into his pants pocket. Now that the tumultuous moment had passed, he felt calmer but still certain. Ecstatically and absolutely certain. He laughed.
“What is it?” she asked, somewhat crossly.
“Nothing,” he said, glancing at her happily. On the next corner, there was a coffee shop of the old-fashioned New York variety that was mainly dirty white tile walls and a black and white tile floor. The small tables were occupied by derelicts hunched over thick white mugs. “Here,” he said genially, “here’s a place.”
“Here?” she said doubtfully. “It doesn’t look …”
“Oh well, we could …”
But she had gone firmly ahead, pressing the door open and marching in. She said, “Shall we sit at the counter?”
“No, oh no. Let’s sit at a table.” He laughed again. She glanced at him queerly. He yanked out a chair for her and sat down himself. Well, really, the place wasn’t awfully attractive, not even clean. The tabletop held pepper and salt shakers, a paper napkin holder, a glass ashtray. Its surface was speckled with dabs of various hardened materials—he recognized ketchup and a splotch of frizzled cheese.
A long, thin white hand with nicotine-stained fingernails now pushed a gray wet wad of cloth across the table between them, more evenly distributing the spots. “What’ll you have?” the man asked. This waiter, who was also the counter person, had his name embroidered on the pocket of his white shirt—“Phil.” A lit cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth.
Liz stared downward. Leonard cleared his throat. “Coffee,” he said.
“That all?” Phil asked.
“Yes,” Leonard said, “just coffee.” He looked across the table at her. Her plain tanned faced, this face that he now loved, with its gently curved, sun-bleached brows.
She said, “I’d rather have tea, if you don’t mind.”
“One coffee,” Leonard said, looking up, “and one tea.”
“And a doughnut,” she said, looking up at Phil. “Do you have doughnuts?”
“Only plain, lady,” Phil said.
“One coffee,” Leonard said firmly, “one tea, and one plain doughnut.” He smiled across the table at her. She lifted her eyes to him but her look was wary. He wondered why. Her mother’s illness? He said, leaning toward her across the smeared table, taking care not to touch it with his hands or his arms, “Tell me about your mother. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you say something?”
Her face, the face he now loved, that was so calm, and sometimes so mask-like, began before his very eyes to change shape, wobble, dissolve. The gold-brown lashed fluttered, her eyelids fell closed, the mouth he loved for its plainess and severity trembled
and drew up in a curve that mimicked laughter, but was, in fact, pain. She said, in her low voice, “She’s so sick.” And then shrugged and looked off to the side.
Unmindful of the dirty table, Leonard pushed his arms in their jacket sleeves across the table to her and turned his hands up and opened his palms and she stared at his proffered hands thoughtfully, as if considering what to do, and then, in a complicated movement, extricated her hands from beneath the table, and carefully laid them in his. He closed his hands over hers. He felt the rings on her fingers, the wedding band, the giant protuberant diamond. He said, “I’m so sorry.” She smiled and looked up. “Do you know what I thought? I thought you were high. You don’t do drugs, do you? I mean, seriously?”
“No.”
“Did you ever?”
“A little,” he admitted.
“I used to but I gave it up. It was getting too important. You didn’t tell me about your grandmother, either.”
“How did you know?”
“I just saw your Aunt Louise. I needed some advice about my brother. It’s such a mess. It’s so awful. I have no idea what to do.”
He pressed her hands. He meant “go on” but instead she stiffened and lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“About what?” he asked, perplexed.
The coffee came, and the tea, with the doughnut on a heavy grayish plate, and like guilty children they dropped their hands and hid them under the edge of the table.
Afterwards they left together, but she hurried away from him, saying she had parked downtown.
Driving home he had a terrible letdown, the kind of letdown you have after smoking pot, or drinking too much. By the time he got onto the highway, his mood had plummeted. He was a fool, she’d never love him. Did she even like him? She had a way of closing up that made him feel rebuffed. She must have thought he was crazy. No, she’d said it—high. She’d thought he was high. Well fine. He’d been high. Now he wasn’t.
But although his mood changed, his feelings did not. When he woke up the next morning he thought, “I’m in love with Liz,” and he got out of bed feeling heavy and depressed. He told himself that at least he didn’t feel hollow any more—heavy and sad was better than empty, wasn’t it? And maybe something would change, change her.
Shaving, feeling much less ebullient, he acknowledged (at last) to the pale face in the mirror those two encumbrances, Alice and Skip, and he went gloomily down the stairs to the kitchen. Wayne said, lifting his coffee mug in salute, “By George, here he is, Chief Looklaka Thundercloud.” He felt her watching him and, in confusion, he hardened his face and turned away.
VI
SIBLINGS
1.
A couple of days after I visited my mother, I decided to drive down to see my father. I hadn’t seen him for months. He’d come up to the Ridge in March and we’d gone for a cold windy walk on the county road. It was hard for me to hear. His voice faded and boomed, words blew away or momentarily stuck, like scraps impaled on a bush full of thorns. He shouted that he was happy, happy! They liked the new house, house!
It was like walking near the sea, and the wind picked up the glittering leftover road salt and flung it in your face. He wanted to see Skip, but Skip had gone to call on an important client who lived in another town. We decided to eat dinner at Sonny’s, but when we got there the place was dark and a sign on the door said CLOSED. The whole day was a failure. I had had nothing to say to him. Despite the scarf I’d wound around my face, my lips were numb and the next day I had a terrible cold.
Thinking about that day, I drove over Schooley’s Mountain and through Long Valley to my father’s new house in Old-fields. I took with me as a gift three quart baskets of local strawberries—my father loved strawberries. Buying them, I’d thought of my mother driving all over town trying to find fresh berries for him when he was recuperating from an attack of pleurisy. She’d made his favorite dessert, a trifle—strawberries drowned in a custard sauce set on a pound cake soaked in rum, the whole thing smothered with heavy cream. He’d eaten it to please her and then vomited.
Oh heck, the trouble with my father’s remarrying was this—it had ruined the way I remembered my childhood. It was as if someone had drawn a crude black crayoned “X” across the elegant strokes and delicate tints of a prized pastel. I dreaded meeting the new spouse, hearing allegations of current marital bliss, a heaven compared to that hell with the former wife (a hell that included me). I tried being rational. I said to myself, ‘People change, situations change.’ No good. It all seemed so sad, how out of your past you remembered certain joyful familial moments, and they were maybe just your joyful moments, and no one else’s.
He had given me clear directions on the telephone and I found the roads easily. Since my grandparents’ time not so much had changed. This was still green, rolling New Jersey country—the same fenced fields contained the same placidly grazing thoroughbreds.
A couple of miles outside the village I turned off onto Whipple Lane. There was the small house he’d described, white with green shutters, no garage, an unmowed lawn. I parked next to a blue Chevy pick-up truck. The strawberries were so ripe that they’d bled through the bag and I walked with the stack offered forward, as if I were leading a holy procession of some kind. Well, why not? She had been a nun; the baby was due in December.
The back door opened and she called out, “Liz?” “Hi, I’m Dolores. Welcome.” When I saw her my heart sank. Now what would I tell my mother? Her hair was white and fell stiffly to her shoulders. She had airy, prominent features, pink and white skin, black-fringed dark blue eyes. In fact, she was beautiful. She wore a blue shirt over dark walking shorts.
Following her down the hall to the living room, I saw a bedroom tumbled with clothes. Was she a manic shopper, or were they leaving? I said, “Going on a trip?”
She turned. “What?”
“My father said you’d be taking a trip this summer. Are you leaving soon?”
“Yes.” She pointed to a chair.
“Thank you. Will you be gone long?”
“I don’t know.”
Perhaps she was stupid, beautiful but stupid. That would be acceptable. She sat down, crossed and entwined her long bare white legs. “I have no idea how long we’ll be gone.” She looked at me directly. I had an impression of intelligence and strength. Worse and worse. I would have to report that she was beautiful, and intelligent. Yes, it was very bad indeed. If only she’d been a beautiful dumbbell, or an ugly genius. She seemed to have every virtue except one: her voice was unpleasant, flat and practical, slightly nasal and grating, without any shading or musical chiaroscuro. However, this gave everything she said a gritty assurance. She could have said, ‘The moon is goo,’ and you would have believed her. I wondered, though, if my father didn’t miss my mother’s ravings. Waving a cigarette all the while, my mother would talk your ear off, swinging from one idea to the next like a kid on a playground jumping from the teeter-totter to the monkey bars. Sometimes she made you laugh and sometimes you wanted to cover your ears, but she always made you think. Well. Maybe he didn’t want to think anymore.
The living room had a bay window and a fieldstone fireplace. Two old rockers with rush seats were pulled up at either side of the hearth, a wide black hearth that looked like a toothless mouth. A Workbench sofa with slatted wood sides hunched in front of the window. A stereo system sat by itself in a corner. Books in tall stacks leaned against the bare, freshly painted white walls. It was the house of a young graduate school couple just starting out.
“Cal’s not here, as you can see,” she said practically. “He had to go into the hospital, but he’s anxious to see you.” She looked past me, at a blank white wall. “How is your mother?”
I looked past her, at the unmowed lawn that was full of daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. “Not awfully well.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. That I couldn’t make your wedding.”
“I suppose,” she s
aid in her flat no-nonsense voice, “it’s hard.”
“Yes. I have certain feelings of loyalty.”
“I meant the drive.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s a hard drive from where you live, isn’t it?”
“Not really. It’s not that far, it was just … Where was it you met my father?”
“At the hospital.”
“You were a nursing sister?”
“No. He was taking care of a cousin of mine who had an ulcer. I haven’t been a sister for a long time, not for eight years.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Personal reasons.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I went back to school. I got a degree in social work and psychological counseling. I’m a therapist. I specialize in drug abuse and alcohol.”
“I’ve always hated that, the way people say, ‘he abuses drugs.’” She looked at me. “Well,” I said, beginning to feel defensive and too warm, “it’s stupid. You can’t abuse a drug, you’re abusing yourself. Don’t you see? It’s ungrammatical. And then because you’re ‘abusing a drug’—which is certainly inaccurate—it becomes a euphemism. It’s a way of letting people off the hook. There’s nothing bad about ‘abusing drugs.’ They’re inanimate objects.”
“You’re against letting anyone off the hook?”
“I’m against living in la-la land. Why did you marry my father? He’s so much older than you are.”
“I liked him.”
“Everyone always likes him. He’s very likable.” There was sarcasm in my voice. She looked at me suspiciously. I said, trembling, “This is so unfair to my mother.”
She blinked and rolled up out of her chair. She said, looking down at me and raising her voice so that it was loud and even and clear, like a grammar school teacher’s, “I really don’t care to discuss this.” Instantly, I felt transported to third grade, the year I had done badly at paper crafts. She said, “Let’s go for a walk.” Feeling cowed, I acquiesced.
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