Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  The lobby had an indefinable but unmistakable smell: boiled potatoes, cleaning liquids, old, tired marble, and the sadness of elderly Jews. It was a smell he knew from all the Upper West Side apartment buildings of his youth.

  The elevator was an ancient affair; as it slowly rose, he had the most peculiar sensation of being drawn back in time. It was as if he’d been his forty-seven-year-old self when he’d stepped in off the street, and now, by the fifth floor, he was a boy.

  He shook that off quickly. He was wearing a sport jacket. His teenage daughter was at his side. He was a grown man.

  “I wonder what you’ll think of this place,” she said.

  She opened the front door to an apartment with shabby furniture, faded walls, wooden floors that hadn’t been polished for decades, and, compensating for all this, a view of the late-spring greenness of Riverside Park.

  He put his bags down, and felt peaceful. He was where he belonged, not because he was back in the city of his youth, but because his wife and one of his two children were here.

  “Where’s the woman?”

  Emily tilted her head and he went that way.

  Janine was on the couch in the living room. She was in her bathrobe, with a pile of wadded-up tissues beside her.

  “You look like hell, darlin’,” Daniel said.

  He said it quietly, and Emily, watching them, felt embarrassed. Though her father hardly ever put any of it into words, the intensity of his feelings was sometimes close to unbearable. The way he was looking at her mother now made Emily retreat from the room.

  13

  The next few hours were a strain. Janine felt strained, at any rate. She couldn’t be sure how anyone else felt.

  She and Daniel had been married for twenty-three years. She considered their marriage to be happy; she considered their marriage to be successful—not in superficial ways but in real ways. But they’d been apart for months, and whenever they spent even a few days apart, the experience of coming together reminded her of the simple fact that he wasn’t her type.

  He was so male, she thought, as he stalked around the kitchen, breathing on things. She and Emily had spent two months in a rapport so intuitive that they weren’t even aware of it. But now Daniel was here, smearing his maleness over everything.

  She was at the kitchen table drinking tea and he was going through the cupboards. He was looking for something to eat, ostensibly, but as she watched him, she began to be possessed by the idea that even if he was hungry, the desire to eat was secondary right now, and that his primary desire, even if it was an unconscious one, was to mess up her arrangements. He looked in the refrigerator and moved things around; he looked in the cupboard and moved things around. Supposedly just looking, he put the sugar where she kept the tea and the tea where she kept the raisins and did God knows what with the raisins.

  He wasn’t really messing things up, just moving things around. It was as if, in setting up the place, she’d played a white pawn, and now he was playing a black pawn, and the game was on again, the great game of marriage.

  14

  “Let’s take a walk,” she said.

  They walked up Broadway. She started to feel better now that they were out and about.

  “How’s everything been?” Daniel said. “How’s the girl?”

  “She’s doing well. She looks good, don’t you think?”

  “She looks great. What’s she been up to?”

  “She’s excited to be starting that class. Women writers, from—”

  “Has she talked about going back to school for real?”

  “Only when I bring it up. But yes. She wants to. She’s been looking at catalogs on the computer.”

  “She doesn’t want to go back to Oberlin?”

  “Probably not. She says sometimes she thinks she wants someplace bigger, sometimes she wants someplace artsier. She says she likes being a student, but she prefers to approach it at a slant.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Unhappy during the first semester of her sophomore year, Emily had decided to take the second semester off and work at the bookstore where she’d worked for the last three summers. When it abruptly went out of business in March, she’d accepted Janine’s invitation to spend a few months with her in New York.

  “Have you heard from the boy? He never answers my phone calls.”

  Their son had graduated from Reed a year ago and was now in Portland, living hand to mouth.

  “The boy is doing just fine,” she said. “The boy is reading and writing. Or so he claims.”

  “Or so he claims. What is it he’s supposedly writing?”

  “I don’t know. Beat poetry. The Great American Novel.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “Without having read a word, you know exactly what it’s like. If he’s writing it.”

  She nodded but didn’t smile, because she didn’t want to be disloyal to their son. She knew exactly what Daniel meant, though. If their son was writing a novel, it would be adolescently Kerouacian, a series of stream-of-consciousness whooshings about drugs and sex and travel, and it would be close to unreadable.

  “But maybe he will write the Great American Novel someday,” she said. “Maybe whatever he’s writing now—”

  “If he’s writing now.”

  “Is just something he needs to get out of his system.”

  “Of course. I shouldn’t be so hard on him. Of course he’s writing juvenilia now. He’s a juvenile.”

  “You’re probably one of the few police officers who use the word ‘juvenilia.’”

  “Actually, that’s a misconception. Many of us do. There’s a whole movement.”

  “A movement to use the word ‘juvenilia.’”

  “A movement to increase our vocabularies.”

  “I read about that somewhere. You use—what was it—Word Power?”

  He smiled when she said this, because it was only people of a certain age who remembered the elementary-school vocabulary book Word Power.

  “Word Power. That’s right. We get together once a week, on Fridays, after lunch, and learn new words. One new word a week.”

  “I was going to ask if it was just a word a week. Because that is the Word Power philosophy.”

  “It is the philosophy, and that’s how we do it. There were some who thought we should move more quickly, but the traditionalists held sway.”

  “You’re probably one of the few police officers who use expressions like ‘held sway.’”

  “Actually, that’s a misconception,” he said, and she laughed.

  This was always the way they came back together; this was always the way they healed the rift after being apart. They played. Ever since she had met him, they’d been able to play together, in a way that she simply didn’t do with anyone else.

  It all came back to her now: who he was, what they had.

  15

  But this was a little different from past occasions in which they’d come together after spending time apart. This was different because rather than having to wrench herself back from the pleasures of traveling alone or the pleasures of parenting the children alone (parents will rarely admit this, but most of them find it easier to take care of their children by themselves, without meddling from the spouse), today she had to come back from the pleasures of having met another man. She had hoped that when she saw Daniel, her infatuation with Lev would disappear, and at first she thought it had, but as the day wore on, she admitted to herself that it hadn’t.

  16

  “Would you put that thing away?” Daniel said.

  “I don’t know if I can,” Emily said.

  “Can’t you turn it off for just one hour?”

  “But I never know when I might get a text message from Grandma.”

  They were at an Italian restaurant, where they were meeting Florence and Saul for dinner.

  “Are we sure this is a good idea?” Janine said. “The two of them together?”r />
  “I’ll get back to you on that,” Daniel said.

  When Daniel went outside to return a phone call, Emily said, “Dad seems nervous.”

  “He does?”

  “You haven’t noticed?”

  “No. I haven’t. What have you noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed he seems nervous.”

  “What’s he been doing that makes you think he’s nervous? Has he been biting his nails; has he been—”

  “No. Nothing like that. But I can tell. And you can too.”

  “It’s understandable that he’s nervous,” Janine said.

  “Why?”

  “He’s got a lot on his mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whether to quit his job, for one thing.”

  “He had that on his mind six months ago.”

  “But now it’s six months later. So it’s a different kind of question. And, you know, his parents.”

  “What about his parents? They’re nice old people.”

  Janine wondered if her daughter was being cagey. There were a lot of valid ways to describe Florence and Saul, but “nice old people” wasn’t one of them.

  “His parents are a trip,” Janine said. “His parents are two different trips. You know that.”

  “They’re not that much of a ‘trip’ to me.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Anyway,” Emily said, smiling, “whose parents aren’t a trip?”

  They were sitting near the big plate-glass window, and they could see for blocks.

  “Here she comes,” Emily said.

  Florence was crossing the street, a trim and businesslike and wholly intimidating seventy-five-year-old woman. She was leaning to the side because she had a heavy laptop bag hanging from a strap over her shoulder.

  She was, as usual, lost in her thoughts. She walked past Daniel without seeing him.

  Janine watched him: he was still on the phone, but he lifted his hand to wave to his mother, and smiled wryly after she passed him.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Florence said, as Janine got up to embrace her.

  If she hadn’t been a polite person, Janine would have laughed at this. She and Florence had talked on the phone just after Janine got to New York, and they’d exchanged pledges about getting together soon, and then neither of them had been in touch with the other until Janine saw a notice for the Town Hall panel discussion and wrote to Florence to say that she and Emily would be there.

  Janine had often thought about calling her, but she stopped herself each time, remembering at the last minute that being with Florence was never what you hoped it would be. Florence never let you relax. She was always asking Janine if she’d read this or heard of that, and the answer was usually no. After it was over, Janine would feel as if she’d endured a sort of intellectual pummeling. Florence was vaguely insulting even when she didn’t mean to be. She always made Janine feel as if she hadn’t lived up to the promise of feminism. Janine couldn’t quite understand how she was being made to feel that way, since she was about as feminist as you could get without being an actual activist. She had her own career, which had kept her fascinated for almost twenty years; she’d earned a living at the same time as she’d raised two kids. She didn’t know what the problem was, but evidently there was a problem.

  During her first few years of being married to Daniel, Janine used to try to engage Florence in conversation. She had so many questions she wanted to ask. Are you working on a book? What did you mean by that line in your last book of essays where you seemed to be insulting Susan Sontag? Did anybody ever give you a hard time about the fact that in that essay about the people who’ve influenced you the most, more than half of them were men? But she had found that questions like these invariably met with impatient responses. A few times Janine had asked Florence about key passages in her work—passages that Janine considered key—and Florence didn’t remember them or didn’t think they were important. Janine started to feel like a pathetic fangirl, like one of those people who show up at sci-fi conventions wearing Vulcan ears, so finally she stopped asking Florence anything about her work at all.

  She never fared any better with other subjects. Once or twice, during the early years of their marriage, Janine had been by herself in New York and had given Florence a call, and when they went out to dinner she tried to use Daniel as a conversational icebreaker. But whenever she told Florence something about what Daniel was up to, Florence seemed remarkably uninterested.

  When Daniel got back to the table, Florence started in on him.

  “So how are you, my son? Have you locked up any perps lately?”

  “That’s not really what I do, Mom.”

  “Really? Aren’t you still with the police force?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m with the police force. But I don’t lock up perps.”

  “Do you lock up mopes?”

  “Mopes?”

  “Mopes. That’s what you call the perps if you’re a po-lice.”

  “Someone’s been watching The Wire,” Emily said.

  “Vanessa gave me the DVDs for my birthday,” Florence said.

  “It sounds like you know more about police work than I do,” Daniel said.

  Florence seemed to feel a perpetual urge to needle her son. Janine didn’t understand it, but she had a theory. Her theory was that Florence—both of Daniel’s parents, really—still couldn’t comprehend how he, the child of two certified New York intellectuals, had become a cop. Her theory was that after all these years, they still couldn’t really accept it.

  “So you’re here for how long?” Florence said.

  “Long as I want. I’ve got twenty-two years of vacation days to use up.”

  “They let vacation days roll over? You’ve got a good union.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’ve seriously never taken a vacation in twenty years? That can’t be right.”

  “He took a week a year,” Janine said. “You could set your watch by it.”

  “You never wanted to take some real time off and go somewhere?”

  “I did,” Daniel said. “I did want to. I kept meaning to stop by at a travel agent’s.”

  “And then there were no travel agents anymore,” Emily said.

  “Well, all right. So you’ve finally gotten out of your rut. How do you like being back in New York?” Florence said.

  Daniel slowly finished his drink and put the glass down.

  “I couldn’t be more thrilled.”

  There was an awkward pause, and then Emily said, “He’s acting like he’s joking, but he’s not. We’re all very excited. We’re happy to be in New York, and we’re super happy to see you.”

  She spoke with an obvious sincerity that Janine found touching. Like every other member of her generation, Emily had been infected with the virus of irony, yet she remained capable of emotional directness. She didn’t feel the need to look cool at all times.

  “We are,” Janine said.

  Florence smiled approvingly, probably more because of their affection for New York than because of their affection for her. She was like the ambassador of Manhattan. She seemed to believe that a life that took place elsewhere couldn’t truly be called life. She probably held that it was all well and good for Parisians to live in Paris and Londoners to live in London, but she could not comprehend how any thinking person from the United States could choose to live anywhere other than New York.

  Florence looked at Janine steadily. She looked like someone examining a bill to see if it was counterfeit.

  “I don’t think this one is going back home,” Florence said. “Watch out, boy.”

  Janine felt guilty, as if Florence had seen through her.

  At that moment, the worst possible moment, Janine’s cell phone went off. It was in her purse, which was on the floor next to her; it was buzzing and throbbing and writhing. Really it was just on vibrate, but it seemed to be unusually buoyant just then.

  “You won’t want to go back eith
er,” Florence said to Emily. “I can see it. Where are you going to college again?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “No it doesn’t. Obviously you’ll be transferring to Barnard or NYU.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “For the same reason your mother wants to stay. Both of you hunger for the life of the mind.”

  “I hunger for the life of the mind,” Daniel said mildly, as his second drink arrived.

  “You,” Florence said.

  Janine’s cell phone had gone back to sleep, but now it shook one more time, trembling with joy about having taken a message. She was hoping that she wasn’t blushing.

  “Isn’t your father supposed to be here?” Florence said.

  “I spoke to him yesterday,” Daniel said. “He said he’d be here. With bells on. Whatever the hell that means.”

  “He probably can’t tear himself away from his work. You know Saul. His pen has not yet gleaned his teeming brain.”

  This was a not-nice thing to say, as Saul had evidently gleaned his teeming brain a long time ago. He still called himself a writer, but he hadn’t published anything of significance in twenty years. Though he always claimed to be working, though he always claimed to be in contact with “two or three publishers” who were interested in his work, nothing was ever finished, nothing ever appeared.

  “Let’s just order,” Florence said. “The smart money never waits for Saul to show up.”

  After the waiter went away, Emily said, “So you’re working on a memoir?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Your surprise party. I heard you say something about it to someone before you disappeared.”

  “The famous surprise party,” Daniel said. “Good going, Mom.”

  “Thank you,” Florence said.

  Janine thought she saw a hint of embarrassment in Florence’s face, but she was probably wrong. I’m probably only thinking that because I’d feel embarrassed if I’d done that.

  “‘Thank you all for coming,’” Daniel said. “‘Now leave me the hell alone.’”