“I asked you first.”
“Sure, I’m nostalgic. To get to take classes and read books all the time. To be young and in school, with my parents footing the bill. Of course I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time.”
Sam took a long sip of his properly alcohol-laden mojito, and Elise wished she could have a couple of strong drinks. It had taken until her mid-twenties, but she had finally learned how to make use of the emboldening properties of alcohol. Now she had to pretend her sticky-sweet drink was bitter with the stuff. She didn’t want to keep sitting with him the way she used to, not expressing what she was thinking so strongly that it seemed like he had to know it. But she was old enough now to recognize that wasn’t how things worked. People were their own individual planets, spinning in their own orbits, and to reach someone else you had to throw a meteor sometimes.
“That letter I sent, after we graduated. It was pretty embarrassing.”
“Nah, it was poetry.”
“I don’t think so.”
Sam took another long sip. “Well, I want to apologize,” he said. “The letter I sent you was pretty lame.”
“Yeah, it was.”
“You deserved better. But I didn’t think it would mean we wouldn’t speak again for thirteen years.”
“Did you tell Meg about it?”
“Uh, yeah. Just last week. She wanted to know why we were out of touch for so long.”
Elise was tempted to tell him what Meg had said about his making a mistake. But she could only fling her meteor so far.
“Look, can I ask you something?” Sam said. “What was it that made you feel, you know, the way you did then?”
He’d stolen her question and flipped it—the question she was afraid to ask, that she didn’t know how to ask in a way that didn’t seem whiny or pathetic, but merely curious, a philosopher seeking knowledge: Why didn’t you love me?
She wanted to throw her virgin cocktail in his face, though really he had done nothing wrong. She was the one who had brought the matter up, who couldn’t simply go back to being friends and keep that unrequited business quiet. So she blundered through a vague answer, what anyone might say about loving anyone—the way we talked, the way we laughed, the things we did together, just a feeling.
“Well hey, I’m glad you broke the silence,” he said, when she was done with her fumbling. “It’s good to see you again.”
He was as maddening as he’d always been—laying the groundwork for intimacy, charging the atmosphere with intensity, and then wriggling his way out of it, acting like everything was cool. Derek’s vulnerability had been a revelation; he told her he loved her every day. But at the moment, having such a man for her husband didn’t feel like enough. She wanted restitution for the past, too.
* * *
—
The wallpaper in the guest room had to have been chosen by a previous resident, some woman of floral tastes. Even a guy fond of classical music and a pretty lampshade wouldn’t choose to cover the walls of a room with yellow roses. The worn plaid comforter on the bed seemed familiar, though: the look of it, the feel of it, the smell. It must be the same one that had covered the standard-issue dorm bed where she’d perched while Sam worked at the desk and music sounded from the speakers on his cheap CD player—a tender piano sonata, a knowing string quartet—composed more than a hundred years ago, when the only way you could hear music was to go to a concert or to make it yourself; music so beautiful that, listening to it, you felt it must make you beautiful too, must work like some beneficent cancer, merging with the cells in your body, changing their structure.
On the bookshelf, Elise recognized some of Sam’s old college texts: An Introduction to Art History, Civilization and Its Discontents, A Kierkegaard Anthology. When she’d moved to San Francisco for graduate school, she’d donated her own copy of Kierkegaard to the public library, along with a slew of other books that had been important to her. She’d had to force herself to do it, to rise above sentimentality. She pulled the Kierkegaard off the shelf and leafed through it till she found the section on the Knight of Infinite Resignation. Sitting down on the bed, she began to read. “A young swain falls in love with a princess, and the whole content of his life consists in this love, and yet the situation is such that it is impossible for it to be realized, impossible for it to be translated from ideality into reality. The slaves of paltriness, the frogs in life’s swamp, will naturally cry out, ‘Such a love is foolishness. The rich brewer’s widow is a match fully as good and respectable.’ Let them croak in the swamp undisturbed. It is not so with the knight of infinite resignation: he does not give up his love, not for all the glory of the world.”
Sam had underlined various passages, drawn asterisks in the margins. She’d found this piece so gorgeous. Sam, she thought, had found it so too. He just hadn’t been thinking of her when he read it.
She thought about calling Derek, but she was back in the time before him now. The time when love was not about living with someone, and making decisions together, and pledging yourselves to a future child you’d created, but about lying in a single bed and longing for someone you only touched when you were side by side in a lecture hall or on a bus, and your elbow brushed his, and the sensual thrill was so great you couldn’t bear to get up when the class or the bus ride ended. She had told Derek that she was going to stay with an old college friend, but she hadn’t told him about the feelings she’d had for Sam. He was not a jealous sort, and he trusted her, but what would be the point of turning the story of her love into an anecdote, a childish thing to laugh at or wave away?
She sent Derek a text: Reading went well. Super tired—xoxo, and then got under the covers and rolled onto her side. In a moment, the baby began to move. These jolts had been happening for over a month, but she hadn’t really gotten used to them. Just a few tough layers of skin, a few pounds’ worth of uterus and placenta, separating her from this unknown being that would become—that would have to become—a monumental force in her life forever. In a year this baby would be crawling, scooping up everything it could get its hands on, shoving coins carelessly dropped on the carpet into its mouth. In twenty years this baby would be in college, racking up a lifetime’s worth of nostalgia. In forty years it could be lugging around its own disappointments and regrets and sense of time already running out, and she herself would be an old woman or dead.
In the middle of the night she woke up, as she always did lately, her bladder about to burst. She went out to the bathroom in the hall, flushed the toilet, ran the water in the sink, turned off the light, and paused there between her room and Sam’s. His door was halfway open, the outline of his ornate bureau visible in the dark. It was three a.m. logic, but she felt as if she could walk into his room and get into bed—that she had that right. She stepped closer to his door. Now she could see the shape of him, the sheet pulled up over his body, the back of his neck exposed, between his white T-shirt and his dark hair. After all this time, it wasn’t even that she really wanted to. She loved being in bed with Derek, his familiar warm skin, the way they ran their hands over each other and talked and had sex, as if it was all one thing, one conjoined life. What she wanted at this moment was something impossible, to be in that July night fourteen years in the past, when she might have been bold enough to slide into the borrowed bed with the young man she’d wanted to be her first lover, her first relationship. The two of them just twenty years old, the orchestra at Tanglewood still playing in their heads.
Suddenly Sam’s eyes were open and he was looking at her. “You okay?” he asked.
“Oh yeah, just had to go to the bathroom.”
He lifted his head up, off the pillow. She could walk in there and lie down, press her big, solid belly against him, and perhaps he wouldn’t protest, having learned by now that a night like this wouldn’t have to change anything. What would it feel like? Compensation, triumph, disaster?
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“Go back to sleep,” Elise said. “See you in the morning.”
He sank his head back on the pillow.
She turned toward the rose-wallpapered guest room and got under Sam’s old comforter, that familiar swell rising up, of loneliness and yearning. The Kierkegaard tome sat, stately, on the nightstand. And she began to narrate the story to herself.
A young poet fell in love with a young musician, who didn’t return her sentiments. For a time, he was the glory of her world. Life went on—the frogs croaked in the swamp undisturbed. Then, years later, she gave up her love. The woman is no fool.
June
As the baby was growing inside Natalie’s uterus, her aunt Dina was dying. It became an awful race: which would happen first, the birth or the death? If the baby came first, that meant Dina could see her, the new life dandled before the one on the way out. Natalie’s mother expressed a tearful hope that Dina would hold on long enough to meet her grandniece. Natalie secretly preferred the death to come first, not so it could be followed by a joyous event, but because she didn’t want the baby to detract from it. She wasn’t a practicing Jew, but she wanted to mourn in the traditional Jewish way: stop everything, tear her clothes, sit around all day for a week with relatives she didn’t much like, and accept plates of heavy food she didn’t want to eat. With the congratulatory emails, and the round-the-clock nursing, and the adorable outfits, how could a newborn fit into that ritual of grief?
Up late with nausea and worry, Natalie considered these two lives—Dina’s and the baby’s. Which one would she choose? She had played games like this as an only child in the backseat on long car rides. If just one could be saved—the dog or the cat, her gymnastics team or her Hebrew School class, her mom or her dad—which would it be? While her parents talked to each other about work and bills and other people’s problems, she silently deliberated. By the time they got to Providence, or Cape May, or the Finger Lakes, she had to decide. The dog, the gymnastics team, her dad, Dina.
* * *
—
Dina’s son, Matt, had been born on March twenty-first, Natalie’s half birthday. She was six-and-a-half that year. It was a strange and fascinating fact that on September twenty-first, when she would forever be turning another year older, Matt would forever be having his half birthday. Maybe, Natalie thought, Matt was a kind of half twin. A woman at the supermarket had once asked, wasn’t she lonely with no brothers or sisters, and Natalie supposed that she was. She made her new cousin a card with a joke in it. “WELCOME MATT,” it said, with a picture of a baby boy lying on a red rug in front of a door. She helped her mom pick out a onesie and a stuffed monkey and wrap them in polka-dotted paper. She ran up Aunt Dina and Uncle Rob’s driveway with the card and package in her hand. Dina opened the door, wearing a gray nightgown, her black hair wild around her face. The baby was hiding in a blanket against her chest, and Natalie felt suddenly shy.
“Isn’t he funny-looking?” Dina asked, tilting the bundle in her arms so that Natalie could see.
“Yes,” she said.
“He’s precious,” her mom protested. But Matt looked more like a shrunken Charlie Brown than a half twin.
In the living room, Dina asked Natalie if she wanted to hold him.
“Oh, not yet. He’s so tiny,” Natalie’s mom said.
“She can handle it,” Dina said. “What do you think, Natalie?”
“I’ll sit on the floor so I don’t drop him.”
“Good idea,” Dina said.
Natalie made a nest with her lap and Dina lowered the baby into it. When Matt began to fuss, Natalie put her finger up to his mouth. Matt sucked on her nail, his weird, no-color eyes crossing.
“You know just what to do,” Dina said. “You’ll be like a big sister to him. You’ll be better than a big sister.”
Later, when the three of them were lying in Dina’s bed, her aunt asked Natalie: “Will you help me take care of him? I need all the help I can get.”
Natalie didn’t like helping out at home: clearing the table, sorting the laundry, keeping her room clean. But this was different. Her aunt hadn’t pleaded, bribed, nagged, or demanded, the way her mom did. She had asked. Of course Natalie would help. She fetched baby bottles, retrieved dropped toys, pushed swings, wrestled on jackets and shoes, soothed hurts. She and Dina sat on the bench under the trees at the playground and talked, while Matt ran around and shouted and flung sand out of the sandbox.
Matt was twenty-four now, living in Manhattan and working as a production assistant at an independent film company. Natalie worked at a law firm in Midtown; she took her cousin out for lunch sometimes. Though she and Matt were technically of the same generation, Natalie still felt maternal toward him. She was Dina’s friend first, then Matt’s cousin. It had always been that way. She had become a lawyer, like Dina, and had moved back to Connecticut, near both Dina and her parents.
When Natalie was Matt’s age, it had seemed lame to work in the city and live outside of it. Why spend your free hours in the suburbs when the city itself was freedom? But her husband Ian didn’t love it the way she did. He’d gone to work for his dad’s business in Stamford, and so they’d bought a house close to his office rather than continue renting in New York. At least they were saving money, and had more space, and she could have a pot of green tea with Dina whenever she wanted to.
Now that Ian was comfortably stationed on a street where the trees formed a canopy overhead, and the neighbors were tucked away inside their stone and brick mini-fortresses, the city was hers again, if only in a piecemeal way. She had the twelve-block walk to and from the train station to her office. She had the view of the Chrysler Building and Bryant Park from the conference room window. She had her lunch hour. She had the occasional night out with friends after work. The commute was its own daily pleasure—the train zipping by all the little anonymous scenes, the splendid portal of Grand Central Terminal awaiting her. Gazing up at the luminous light-green ceiling with its gold-etched constellations was a kind of worship, even better than looking at a brilliant sky, because it was a manmade beauty, a triumph of human achievement.
Just after Labor Day, Natalie had stood in Grand Central and answered a call from her mother. It was six o’clock and the high windows still pitched out bands of light. With the train not due to leave for fourteen minutes, she was in the serene position of watching others scurry.
“You’re on your way home?” It sounded like her mother was trying not to cry.
“I have a few minutes. What’s going on?”
“I can’t. Not on the phone. Come by later.”
“Tell me. I’ll worry all the way home.”
“You should worry.”
It wasn’t what Natalie’s mind had leapt to: something had happened with her dad’s job, to her grandfather in the nursing home. It was worse than that. Dina, stomach cancer, stage 4.
With its columns and arches, its marble floors and domed ceiling, Grand Central Terminal had a way of drawing everything into itself. Standing there, surrounded by so many sources of light—windows, wall sconces, chandeliers, display boards, illuminated clocks—you could pretend that grandeur was all. Forget your obligations to other people. Forget the mind’s tedious habits. Forget the body. Forget time. Except that time was master here; you couldn’t outwit it. Natalie’s train would depart in thirteen minutes, and even if she willfully missed it, another train would arrive thirty-seven minutes after that, and another an hour after that, and then another one, all going to the same place.
* * *
—
Two pink lines you were pregnant; one pink line you weren’t. The instructions didn’t say how to interpret a second line so faint it barely seemed to constitute a line at all. Unlike the bathroom in their old New York apartment, this Connecticut bathroom provided plenty of room for two people to deliberate before the sink.
“
I’m not really sure that counts as a line,” Natalie said.
“I think it counts,” Ian said. He was beaming, and she could hardly look at him. They’d been vaguely trying for this for a little while, but in the new rawness of Dina’s diagnosis, the glimmer of another life felt almost like a slap in the face to Natalie.
He took her hand and led her to the living room. It was an October evening, the hour between the sunset and the glow of the street lamps. The brown microsuede couch faced the show-off trees. Ian stroked her bare feet in his lap. “So the baby would come in June. That’s a great birthday month. The end of school, the beginning of summer.”
“It’s just such a bad time right now,” Natalie said. The foot-stroking felt good, and nothing should feel good when Dina was as sick as she was.
“It’s never the perfect time. That’s what everyone says.”
“You mean it’s always something: a new job, a leaky roof, a little cancer in the family.”
The foot-stroking stopped. “But this is a happy thing. Don’t you think everyone would be happy for us?”
“Sure they would.”
“Then let’s celebrate for a minute at least.”
Ian had this hunter-green terry-cloth bathrobe that a dad would wear. He liked to speak in funny voices and coach people through their problems. Natalie wanted to have a child with him. But she couldn’t focus her energy on that now. She was busy being angry, at the world, at God—even though she didn’t believe in God, even though God was just a name in a song, a word in a blessing, a character in a story. Being angry was better than feeling the force of what she was going to lose.
* * *
—
Dina had the tumor removed from her stomach and was now getting treatments (of cell-crushing poison) at a hospital with a fancy Manhattan address. A few blocks away, a gallery displayed four floors of Expressionist masterpieces, a shop sold Turkish rugs, a restaurant served truffles and filet mignon. Dina’s condition was too critical to allow her to go home between chemo sessions; she was stuck here. Wednesday was Natalie’s regular night. Her mom, Matt, and Dina’s two closest friends each had theirs. This way, Dina could count on a dependable retinue of visitors, a network, a rotating team. And this way, they didn’t have to see each other: the healthy, ill-at-ease loved ones clustered around the sick one. They could each come to her on their own terms, like Catholics in a confession booth.
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