Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307)

by Kadish, Rachel

  Do fathers always greet their future sons-in-law with such grim cheer? Do they always shift their gazes from their daughters with that suddenly preoccupied expression? If you’re going to choose another man then I’m going to grit my teeth and make best friends with him and ignore you until you have children. My father, who always said I could be anything I wanted to be, doesn’t seem to have planned for my becoming a wife. He is taking my engagement personally. It is obvious I need to say something to him about this.

  You tell me what.

  Here is my recollection of adolescence: You grow breasts (even if they are not particularly significant breasts), and everyone changes overnight. People you used to count on suddenly find you uninteresting. Other people—ones who never had much to say to you—are abruptly unshakable.

  Engagement, I am coming to believe, is a second set of breasts.

  “How’s work, Dad?” I say when we join them in the inn’s foyer.

  “Fine,” says my father, smiling as though he’s trying to remember my name.

  “How about some hot soup?” my mother interjects.

  I want to curl up in her arms.

  We settle into our rooms, separated by a discreet distance. At this juncture it seems pointless to mention to George that these are not my parents. And in any event he doesn’t look as though he’d want to believe me. His face is animated. He undresses slowly, like a man who’s finally, after a despairing search, stumbled across a club to which he belongs, and he hates to let go of the day. Only one thing seems to perturb him. He settles beside me on the mattress. Wrapping his arms around my waist, he says, “Just one thing, Trace.” He nuzzles my neck. “And I’m sure you didn’t mean anything by it. But I didn’t appreciate your mentioning my job trouble in the car.”

  Holding loosely to his arms, I sift my memory of the last few hours’ exchanges, at last unearthing the small conversational nugget. “But all I said was you’ve been doing a lot of travel. And that you may have some tough negotiations ahead. I didn’t say anything about trouble.”

  “I don’t want them to think I’m not a good provider.” He sits on the bed.

  “But I didn’t mention money. I just said tough negotiations. They wouldn’t—”

  “You made it sound like I was struggling.”

  “George.” I settle against the wooden headboard. “I don’t get it.”

  He sits in silence for a long time. When he speaks he begins heavily, reluctant. “I didn’t tell you about my conversation with my father,” he says. “Just before they left for the airport on Thursday. There wasn’t time to tell you. And I honestly didn’t want to.” His face colors slightly. “My father says I don’t have a clue what it takes to support a family.”

  “I’m sorry, George. I’m really sorry.” I watch him. “But really, we don’t have to care, do we? Your father’s opinions are back in Toronto, and they can stay there.”

  His voice turns adamant. “He’s right. Joel hasn’t given me a raise in years.”

  “But that’s because money is tight. It’s not a sign of disrespect. And you love your work. You’ve told me you’re all right with the money.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  He looks at me as though I am being obtuse on purpose. “Before we got engaged. I’m ready to move forward with life. I want a family salary.”

  “Don’t forget, George, I earn a salary too.”

  His expression sours: this was the wrong thing to say. He rises. As he speaks he paces the length of the room. “I want to move forward. I want to start our family.” He stops by the door and faces me. “I’d like to set a date, Tracy.”

  I draw a deep breath, and stumble off script. “You’re freaking me out.”

  George looks unstrung. He returns to the bed and settles beside me. He lies on his back, hands beneath his head. He doesn’t touch me, but stares at the ceiling. “I know I’ve been difficult.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve been preoccupied. And . . . revved.” He falls silent. Then he props himself on one elbow and, taking my hand, cradles it in both of his palms, considering its bejeweled architecture. “I don’t like to admit this, Tracy.” He looks into my eyes, questioning.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  “And I hope you won’t think less of me, although I know you might.”

  “Tell me.” At the prospect of some heretofore untold secret, an explanation for the way George has been acting, my pulse races.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “I doubt myself.”

  I wait in vain for him to continue. “That’s it?” I say at length.

  He chooses his words with care. “I doubt my ability to live the life I’ve hoped for. I doubt my ability to make the grade in the daily grind. I think there are some things—good things—my father accomplished that I may not be able to achieve.”

  “But of course you feel that. Everyone worries about those things. Don’t you think?”

  “Not everyone,” he says softly. “Sometimes I think I’m just not going to measure up.” A moment passes. Then his gaze leans into mine. Relief washes his eyes. Slowly the tension in his body seems to drain. “It’s good to trust you like this, Tracy.”

  I’m not sure he should.

  For years I believed I understood men. I was comfortable teasing Adam, jousting with Jeff, critiquing male authors whose texts I mined in an intimacy known only to scholars. Now it’s clear to me that all along there was some core impenetrable to me: an untouchable, red-hot male region of shame.

  I do not understand men. I understand only that George has just opened his heart to me in a way he hasn’t for weeks. And that my job is to place suddenly awkward arms around this one man I’ve loved. To cradle his head, gingerly, in my lap.

  “George,” I say after a long time. “I’m sorry your father doesn’t have faith in you. I have absolute faith that you can measure up. More than measure up . . . whatever that means. And as far as I’m concerned your job is just fine.” I hesitate. “Also, listen, I know my parents, and they’re not going to think less of you for a mention of difficult negotiations. Everyone has difficult negotiations, about one thing or another. There’s no shame in that. Everyone has difficulties.”

  George raises his brows: not, apparently, future sons-in-law. “I’m just making a request,” he says. He smiles to soften the impact of this conversational trump card. “If you want we can talk about it more tomorrow. I’m fried.” Then he kisses me, squeezes my hand, and, sliding beneath the covers, turns out the light. At first I think he’s going to reach for me, but his breath slows so quickly I know sleep’s ambushed him.

  The low-ceilinged room is silent.

  Is that part of the marriage contract? Wives pretending their husbands have no troubles?

  George begins to snore.

  If so, then every married woman is the keeper of a secret: her husband’s vulnerability. This is absurd. I will not be married if it means lying to everyone close to me. Isn’t the best thing I have—despite a thousand faults and obstinacies—my honesty? Isn’t pretending men have no doubts the very thing that keeps all the stupid macho stuff going? I’m certain my parents wouldn’t flinch at something as ordinary as tough negotiations.

  Unless they would. Unless they all adhere to an unspoken patriarchal code: my parents, George, the married set, all conspiring to keep the world safe from the least tremor on a male emotional Richter scale.

  I recall my conversation with Hannah, the day of the engagement—only this time the phrase that pops into my head is: the day I lost George.

  Is that it? Is it all lost—the delicate fun, the lightness, the companionship between us? Did its heart stop beating that day?

  At breakfast the next morning I leave the scrambled eggs on my plate and can’t get down my coffee. George and I aren’t going to make it. I cannot be a wife: his, anyone’s. We’re leading my poor, game, color-coordinated parents through a social charade we’ll all regret.

&nbs
p; Midway through breakfast, my mother falls silent. As we rise from the table to prepare for the day’s hiking she gives me a quiet, intimate look I don’t understand.

  We spend the day hiking gullies of boulder and pine. The fresh air is bracing, the vistas austere and lovely. George and my parents comment on the landscape and share safe family stories. I’m lightheaded from hunger, tightlipped. All day my mother’s eyes seek mine—concerned, empathic, reassuring.

  Baffling.

  Yet I can’t recall a moment since childhood when I so longed for an audience with her.

  After dinner George and my father step out to the inn’s reception area to consult maps for tomorrow’s hike. My mother and I settle in front of the fireplace.

  “So, Mom.” I stretch first one calf, then the other, then roll onto my side, deliberately casual as though dealing with a flight-prone animal. I want so much from her it frightens me. I don’t know how to say all I mean. A minute passes; George and my father won’t be gone long. “Tell me,” I say, “about marriage.”

  She nods gravely—as though she’s been waiting thirty-three years for me to ask. “Well,” she says carefully. “Two people just get along.”

  I stare. “Okay. But I mean—you and Dad. And the other couples you’ve seen. What makes marriage succeed? In your opinion?”

  She looks into the fire. For a moment her face works. When she turns to me her eyes are clear, her words quick with the thrill of confession. “Sometimes you have sex more often than you feel like it.”

  The fire emits a loud pop.

  “That’s it?” I say.

  She nods. She sits back, visibly animated at having divulged this secret. She takes a long drink of her wine.

  I stare, incredulous. Exposed yet again, years beyond the point where my childhood hopes should have expired, as a fool.

  As though he’d been watching from the hall, the inn’s burly waiter comes in to offer a refill of her wineglass. She accepts. Once more he offers me a glass, and once more I decline. He leaves. I turn back to my mother. She’s not looking at me, but watching the fire with an expression of wonder, and sorrow, and fulfillment. It’s then, and only then, that I understand her flushed solidarity for the falsehood it is.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I say.

  She offers a slight, knowing smile. Disbelieving.

  Without another word I get up and head to the kitchen, where I tersely obtain a cigarette and a light from a bored busboy. Returning to the inn’s fire, I manage to smoke without coughing, despite the fact that I haven’t touched a cigarette in years. She turns back to the fire. I watch as her expression ranges from shock to an almost heartbreaking disappointment; then to a stony sort of relief.

  By the time she turns back to me, her face is once more blank. A blankness in which I recognize my own paralysis.

  The men return, amiably silent. George sets a tray of hot cocoa on the table and brings me a mug, then settles behind me and begins to knead my shoulders. My father summons my mother to the hallway to consult the map. Alone in the room with George, I glare at the fire.

  “You didn’t tell me your father was into fishing,” he says. “We’re already talking about a summer trip.”

  The dry heat hurts my eyes.

  “You know, Tracy,” he says, “I’ve waited so long for this. For you. I waited so long for someone I recognized, Tracy. Ever since I left Toronto for college I thought, I left home and now I’m cursed: I’ll never have that whole life.”

  His words bounce off me.

  “The love, the sense of family, the kids, the house. I thought: that’s the price I have to pay for freedom. Then I met you, and it just, you know . . .” His speech falters; he takes my hand. “. . . grabbed me. That I can go back to that dream. It’s just . . . the most clear, the most compelling . . .” His voice trails, regroups. “. . . vision. As though I can be forgiven everything.”

  His words scatter among the embroidered pillows and crocheted throw blankets until they’re silenced by my parents’ return.

  My father settles onto the sofa opposite me. His gray, curly hair is silver in the firelight, his face kind. Concerned. “Tracy,” he says.

  Slowly I blow across the scalding surface of the cocoa. “Have you considered mutual funds?”

  “This is where the bride would come down,” says the assistant events coordinator as she strides along the bare pavement between the dark, barbed-looking shrubs of the Botanical Gardens. I slow, falling behind Yolanda, who has locked step with our hostess.

  This foray was, needless to say, Yolanda’s idea. “We’ll have our walk today,” she said this morning. “I promise. We’ll just do it someplace else that I have in mind. It’ll be like homeopathy. Try a teeny dose of wedding planning. You’ll see it’s not toxic. You might even start to imagine yourself walking down the aisle with him.”

  “And here,” continues our hostess breathlessly—she of shining countenance, the sort of girl who loses sleep worrying that she’ll cry at her own wedding and she’s not sure waterproof mascara really holds—“is where the guests would sit.”

  We stand in a paved clearing. Silvery tree trunks and bare metal trellises surround us, the winter beauty of an urban garden. One might almost forget the city bristling a few hundred yards away—except for the beeping of a truck, backing up somewhere beyond the circular drive.

  I have to be at a faculty meeting in fifty minutes. “What about the traffic noise?” I say.

  Yolanda rolls her eyes. I’m not opening my heart to the wedding spirit.

  Our hostess’s smile is all sweetness: I’ve made her day by asking. “In the spring,” she breathes, “when the leaves are put on, they really break the sound barrier.”

  WhhhooooooshhhBOOM! Here comes the bride.

  “That’ll be perfect,” says Yolanda.

  “Congratulations,” I say to Jeff. “Richard must be thrilled. And I hope the department there is as good as it sounds.”

  He purses his lips. “Mad at me for leaving?”

  I sigh.

  “How’s your work, O bride?”

  I shrug.

  He raises his coffee for a toast. “Keep your pecker up, as the Brits would say. You’re going to get tenured. I’ll fly up from Atlanta to lead the voting parade next month.”

  I nod my thanks. “I hope you can persuade them. I suspect you’ve lost a bit of political clout.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Yes, I’ve lost clout—I turned into a ghost the instant I announced my resignation. No one’s going to invest in camaraderie if they know you won’t be around to reciprocate. But my status isn’t going to hurt you. You never needed my help for tenure.”

  Eileen appears outside Jeff’s office doorway. “Good afternoon,” she sings. “I thought I’d hand-deliver these.” In her hand is a stack of photocopies.

  Jeff sips his coffee without glancing at her. “You know,” he says to me sotto voce, “how Thomas Pynchon’s never been photographed, or seen in public? America’s mystery author? Well, I’ve solved the mystery.” Almost imperceptibly he tilts his head toward Eileen. ”It’s her.”

  Eileen approaches his desk. And then, as if she’s just noticed me, “Oh, Tracy!”

  Jeff leans back in his chair, arms folded.

  “So have you set a date yet?” Eileen prods, still holding Jeff’s photocopies.

  “Not yet, Eileen.”

  “Really?” She plants her broad bottom on the edge of Jeff’s desk and, hugging the photocopies to her bosom, faces me. “Why not?”

  Jeff laughs aloud.

  Yolanda leads me into the photographer’s apartment. “She’s supposed to be the best,” she whispers. “I had to call in a favor to get this appointment, so behave yourself.”

  “You said we were going to your yoga class.”

  “We are. After.”

  “And you said you just needed my company on a quick errand of yours.”

  “That’s right. This is my errand. It’s my mission. It’s not like I have
much else going on in my life these days anyway.” Patently untrue—Why the Flower Loves the Rod is a week into its second run, and Yolanda has had a surge in audition callbacks for other projects. Still, since my engagement she’s never been too busy to let me trail her, miserable company though I’ve been. “I’m going to show you,” she says, “that wedding planning isn’t too clichéd for an intellect like you. And it doesn’t have to be terrifying. And this way if you like this photographer’s work, you can call her the minute you set a date.”

  On the walls of the photographer’s apartment are large color wedding portraits and soft-focus hilltop picnic scenes. Most are shots of the photographer’s own family—the women straight-backed and tailored, the men trim-bellied and hair-gelled. The photographer—a woman in her mid-fifties with frosted hair, designer glasses, an impeccable mauve suit and matching manicure—settles her sample album on the table.

  Glancing to my right, I indicate a photo hanging on the wall: a generously sized portrait of a bride and groom surrounded by a half-dozen others, including the photographer herself in a gold lamé dress. “Your children?”

  “That’s my son,” says the photographer with pride. Her fingernails click briskly against the tabletop. “He’s divorced now. But we all look so good in that portrait I couldn’t discard it.” She smiles fondly at the picture. “So I lasered in one of my cousin’s daughters. The body in the wedding dress is Steve’s ex-wife, but the face is his cousin Emma.”

  Emma’s plump, freshly scrubbed face looks somewhat disoriented atop a slim, lovely figure, about to be wed to her second cousin. And it is under Emma’s glazed smile that I am led, page by page, through the perfect pictorial story my wedding could be. Price tag: $4,200.

  Yolanda, doggedly attentive, looks like she’s in pain.

  “Everyone marries under false pretenses.” The deli cook slams down her heavy pot. “Why do you think they bother making the vows so binding? Doesn’t matter if you’ve known the person your whole life, you’re still in for a rude shock.”