“But not recently,” he said. He left.
Waking one night, I was alone in bed. I was angry with Griff—I still considered myself, in some way, separated from Griff—but I went downstairs to look for him, after glancing into Annie’s old room. In his dark green woolen bathrobe, a substantial Christmas/Hanukkah present the girls had chipped in on, he was in the living room, turning the creased pages of the New York Times he’d read earlier that day. The robe was elegant. “Are you okay?” I said.
He looked up, studied me for a minute. “She has to go,” he said.
“Who?” I said, though I knew. But he hadn’t mentioned Barker Street for a week or two.
“Jean Argos is dangerous.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I said. I couldn’t prove Jean wasn’t dangerous, but I needed her friendship. I shopped more often at the market where we’d met but hadn’t seen her again.
“I’ve called a special board meeting.”
“Boards can turn dangerous,” I said. “Sometimes they try to get rid of somebody good.” I stood, looking at him. He was still turning the pages of the newspaper but not reading it.
“That’s so,” he said.
I sat down. We were ten feet apart. I felt as I looked at him as if an invisible iron bar separated us. We were each fastened to an end of it—we could not go far from each other—but it was rigid: we could not go closer. We stared at each other. Both of us were starting to be old.
I wanted to stretch out my arms and say his name—Joshua, or Griff—but I couldn’t. I said, “You can’t fire her.”
“Why can’t I?”
“I mean, you mustn’t. Maybe you can, but you mustn’t.”
“You don’t know,” he said. “It’s the responsibility.”
Now he was quiet for so long I thought the conversation was over. We’d stand, turn out lights, make our way upstairs. Maybe we’d talk some more as we got back into bed, maybe not.
But he said, “You don’t know what I think. You don’t know how I think.”
“Surely,” I said, “if there’s one thing I know, it’s what you think, Joshua Griffin!”
“No,” he said. “You don’t. You don’t know what I felt when Helen died. You don’t know what I felt about Val’s book. You wouldn’t have broken up with me if you did.”
“Don’t tell me you’re bringing that up again!”
But he was. Maybe because I was so tired, I let him talk. “Way, way back,” he said. “When I first did it.”
“You mean—when you shot—?”
He told me again that he’d shot the man’s hand. That he felt he had to. That I had always thought he had to—and he knew why I thought that. But that his shot, for which he had not even gone to prison, had made everything possible. Had made Helen’s crime possible.
I objected yet again, as I had decades earlier. Helen—unlike Hannah in the book—was responsible for her own acts. She was not led around by anyone. She made the decision. “You have to give her that!” I said. “You have to hear me. You’ve never heard me!”
Griff said, “But I know she did it on her own. I know that. I mean something else.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean, you have never thought about my crime the way you would if I carried it out today, or if anyone carried it out, at any time, in”—he paused—“in a different context.”
Startled, I stood up, reached to the side as if something had fallen: a small cushion on the sofa was about to drop off the edge, and I straightened it.
He said, “You gave Val an idealized version of what I did. You didn’t take seriously what I did or what Helen did. If it’s wrong when terrorists commit violent acts against random people for what I am sure they think are very fine reasons, it was wrong back then, too.”
“But you had a good reason for shooting that cop,” I said. “You were protecting those girls.”
“I could have rushed forward and grabbed the stick,” he said. “I could have kicked him in the stomach.”
I stared at him. He was still sitting, but he had dropped the creased newspaper at his feet. “What does this have to do with Jean?” I asked.
“Responsibility.”
I couldn’t answer. I tried to remember why I had separated from him—not this recent pretend separation but the real one, thirty years before. With what felt like the kind of effort that would have been required if there really had been an iron bar between us, I stood and walked slowly toward him, bending it. I started to cry. He stood. I put my arms around him, and he put his around me. He held me so tightly I could hardly breathe. After a long silence, I laughed, and he laughed, and we went back to bed.
By now, my job was a little easier, with the book on embroidery done, but that just made it clearer how hard it was to write the essay. At least Griff and I had located each other in our fractured house. I brought the TV down to the living room, remembering that I’d worked reasonably well while Griff watched baseball during the summer. I sat with my laptop and typed notes to myself, watching or half-watching or not watching basketball. He muted the sound. My notes were repetitious, incoherent, disconnected. We didn’t discuss Jean, but I had the feeling that he hadn’t changed his mind. He still wanted to fire her. I didn’t bring it up. For all I knew, I told myself, he was right.
One morning at breakfast, he sat with his oatmeal at one edge of the table, and I sat kitty-corner to him with my coffee and toast and yogurt. As usual, the coffeepot, loaf of bread, newspapers, and everything else we needed were also crowded together on the table. My elbow knocked over the milk. It was open. The newspapers were soaked, and in the confusion, the glass carafe of the coffeepot—which I was holding in one hand when I reached for the milk with the other—fell to the floor and broke, spilling hot coffee.
As we mopped and straightened, at last I saw that sensible people who could afford it—we could—would remove the wall between the kitchen and the empty room behind it. And buy a larger table. “All right,” I said.
“All right?”
“Bring in the carpenters.” I waved my arm as if in a ballroom. “We’ll open up the wall.”
“Renovations are hell,” he said, but his face broke into its old-man wrinkles as he smiled. His skin looked worn these days. I reached out a finger to stroke his cheek.
“Do you ever think of retiring?” I asked.
“I dread it.”
“Yes.”
He was in pajamas and a bathrobe, and as we stood next to our wrecked breakfast, waiting for more coffee to drip into a mixing bowl I’d stuck where the carafe belonged, I reached my arm under the bathrobe and around his body, over his expensive, well-made navy blue pajamas. Griff was still slim, still muscular. I held him. “I’d be nicer to you,” I said, “if I could write that essay.”
Joshua Griffin
Sundays, in my mind, are still yellow—egg-yolk yellow—as they were when I was a child. The other days are light brown, a functional wooden color. On a cloudy Sunday morning in winter, I drink coffee in the living room, reading the paper at Olive’s big work table. Barnaby is under the table, between my feet, having created his morning arrangement of dog’s body and man’s body, though we aren’t in the kitchen. Carpenters have begun working, after Olive mysteriously agreed to bring the kitchen wall down. They don’t work on Sunday, but we’ve dismantled the kitchen.
Olive comes down the stairs behind me, and I turn and look at her in her old gray quilted robe, which makes a sound when she walks. Her steps on the stair are steady and even. Since she hurt her ankle last summer, her walk has become deliberate.
“Good morning,” I say, but she has gone into Martha’s old room, where we’ve put the refrigerator for the time being. Dishes and bread are on a table. The toaster oven is on the floor. I hear her assemble her breakfast.
“You want more coffee?” she says from the other room.
“I don’t know yet,” I say.
She says, “Do you remember when Annie
sang a solo in that concert?”
“What about it?”
Annie was in high school. I remember how she walked to the front of the stage. I was afraid she’d fall off, afraid she’d sing the wrong notes, afraid I’d cry.
“Our mothers,” Olive says, “sitting together and blowing their noses.”
I say, “Annie did well. She sang well.” All our parents are dead now. Olive’s mother, the last, died two years ago. We might do anything now—disgrace ourselves.
“Of course she sang well!” Olive says. She brings a mug of coffee and a plate of toast. Both hands are full, and she lets her elbow touch my shoulder as she passes me, a morning touch.
“That was many years ago,” I say.
“I woke up thinking about it,” she says.
Then she stands still, behind me, her hands still full. “Griff.”
“What?” I say.
“Did you have that board meeting? Do you still think Jean is dangerous?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes to dangerous, or yes to the meeting?”
I say, “We had to postpone the meeting. It’s coming up.”
She says, “I don’t know—I don’t know anything. But I think you may be wrong.”
“I know you think that,” I say.
She stands quietly for a long moment. I expect that she’ll carry her breakfast upstairs or sit behind me on the sofa, across the room, but she puts her food beside mine. I stand to give her my chair, but she pats my shoulder and pulls over a chair from the corner. Our furniture is in disarray.
“I think you love me more than I give you credit for,” she says, sitting down.
“That’s true,” I say.
“I’ll never stop fighting with you.”
“I know,” I say.
Rumpled from sleep, she sits beside me, and the sleeve of the robe touches my arm. The dog moves over to lie with his body linking one of Olive’s feet and one of mine. I have his head, and Olive has his rear. He sighs. I know he isn’t sentimental. He’s waiting for crumbs to fall, and I suppose they do.
Olive Grossman
I wanted to invite Jean over when Griff wasn’t home, but he’d walked in unexpectedly twice, as if he could sense her wherever he was. I never worried that he’d fall in love with Jean—not Griff’s style—but work connections are little affairs, with intense feelings, positive and negative. Jean and Griff were hurt lovers—people who should have performed not good sex but good work together, and almost did. Their animosity came from their similar wish to help. I wanted to talk to Jean—I wanted the friendship I had thought was imminent.
Then I was invited to talk about Bright Morning of Pain in public once more, not because people were thinking in particular about that book—though there had been a few mentions in the press of the coming new edition—but because someone who remembered my connection to Val organized a panel discussion at a library: “Authors Up Close.” The other speakers would be the onetime Yale roommate of a well-known author and the daughter of another well-known author.
The Institute Library is a pleasantly dilapidated, nineteenth-century workers’ reading room, located up a rickety staircase in downtown New Haven, kept open by one or another civic hero. Jean Argos must have seen some publicity about this event, because there she was on the appointed evening, a couple of rows back in the block of chairs set out in front of the speakers. I waved and smiled, hoping I could catch her afterward. Griff hadn’t come.
The panel went better than I’d expected. The novelist’s daughter was uninhibited—her mother wrote on the toilet, she said—and the roommate of the other author, a psychologist, was canny about his friend. About Val, I said what I’d always said: she was dynamic and vigorous in high school, a bold writer even then; we had little contact in college; we discussed Helen Weinstein after her death. I decided it would be all right to tell the story of how I blurted out that I didn’t like the title of Val’s book, and Val didn’t care.
“Do you like the book itself?” the moderator asked, peering over his glasses at me. I wondered for a moment whether my old essay about my connection to the book—or the ensuing controversy—had somehow made it onto the internet and how much homework he’d done. Maybe he didn’t like the novel. He sat back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head—as if he expected me to speak for quite a while in response to his question.
I said I liked the book, that like Val—I smiled—it was larger than life, not quite emotionally accurate, not my favorite sort of novel, not Jane Austen. But it was true to itself. The daughter of the famous novelist said that her mother had loved Bright Morning of Pain, and several older women in the audience nodded and smiled.
In the question period, I was asked about Val’s politics, and I said we’d once gone to a protest against the Vietnam War together. Most of the questions were for the other speakers. None of my friends were present except Jean, and some audience members had clearly not heard of Bright Morning of Pain.
Jean waited for me at the end, rising up and down on her heels with ill-concealed impatience while a woman I didn’t know told me what she’d done in the sixties. “Let’s go eat,” I said to Jean, when I finally got away.
“Okay,” Jean said, “on one condition. Your husband is trying to get rid of me, and I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t care whether you agree with him or not—I just don’t want to discuss it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Fine.” I wanted to talk about it, but I understood how she might feel. “I’m grateful that—” I said. “In the circumstances—”
“Okay,” Jean said. “Enough.”
We walked to a Japanese restaurant. It was late winter, a windy evening with the feel of spring coming.
Jean was quiet, and now that I had found a way to spend time with her (we could do this again!), I wondered what we’d talk about if not Griff’s attempt to fire her. But when we were seated in the restaurant, Jean said, “Why the hell didn’t you say what you think?”
“What?” I looked up from the menu. I didn’t answer her question but talked about the woman writer whose daughter had been on the panel. I said, “I’ll never think of her again without picturing her writing on the toilet.”
“On a laptop, do you think?”
“Mmm, no. I bet she never switched to a computer.” I proposed an IBM Selectric on the lady’s lap, then felt contrite. “She used a notebook and pen,” I said firmly.
Jean laughed, but then she shoved her tangled hair off her face as if preparing for action. “But, Olive, why the bullshit? That’s not what you think.” We were eating miso soup.
“Oh, it’s what I think,” I said. “It’s not the whole long story, but if I have to say what I think in a few minutes, that’s what I think. Don’t worry—I always say what I think. Any of my friends will tell you I say what I think when I would be much better off keeping my mouth shut!”
“You don’t like Bright Morning of Pain,” she said. “You think Valerie Benevento should have told the truth about your friend.”
I tried to explain. As Helen’s friend, I might want the book to be different—but as a reader, I knew Val had to write whatever book she needed to write.
“No, she didn’t,” Jean said. “I enjoyed that book—but there are limits.”
“Actually, there are no limits. The imagination—”
“You don’t think that,” Jean said again. “You’ve been furious with Valerie Benevento all these years.”
“You’re not listening,” I said, getting annoyed. I spoke slowly. “I am furious, yes. But my fury doesn’t change the rules. This is goddamn freedom of speech. Did you ever hear of that?”
I told her the story—the story of how I helped Val write the book, the story of the essay, the story of the controversy and Val’s death. “I do care,” I concluded. “I would like people to know that Helen Weinstein was my friend, even if that makes them disapprove of me. And I’d like people to know who Helen was. That she was serious. That she had r
easons, whether we can make sense of them or not. But Val was free to write whatever book she liked. I should have written about Helen myself, but Val was the one who thought to do it.”
“I don’t say she should have gone to jail for lying about Helen,” Jean said. “I just say she shouldn’t have done it.”
We’d finished our soup and were starting our sushi. Jean put down her chopsticks and crossed her arms on the table the way Helen herself used to—all those late-night sticky tables. Here, at least, the table was clean.
“I need you to understand,” I said. “I like you.”
“I like you a lot,” Jean said. “And I do understand. I’m not completely uneducated. You literary types think everyone is an idiot who doesn’t have your kind of education. I have a different education.”
This was getting personal. “All right,” I said. “What should I have said?”
“It was a perfect opportunity, and you blew it,” Jean said. I noticed that her nose was bony and had a slight tilt.
“I don’t need opportunities,” I said. “I don’t sit around waiting for justice on this issue. That audience never even heard of Val. Or Helen.”
“Some of them had heard of both. And some of them thought that Hannah was Helen and the ‘I’ character was Val. That it happened. You should have told the real story. You should have said that Hannah isn’t Helen.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, and then paused, hearing myself.
Jean’s eyes opened slightly, and her head moved back. “What don’t I know?”
I told her what I’d never told anyone: that Val had claimed Helen wrote her a letter—which she’d destroyed—saying she didn’t want to be a revolutionary but was afraid to run away, and that when I had challenged Val about it, Val said I couldn’t prove it hadn’t happened.
We were silent when I finished. “She really needed to think Helen didn’t mean it, didn’t she?” Jean said.
“And to think Helen was her friend.”
“Was she?” Jean put down her chopsticks again. Once more she brushed back her hair. It was short, graying blond hair, always untidy.
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