The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  He shakes his head. “I got all these supplies from the hardware store. Come,” he says. “Let’s start with the bathroom.”

  She follows him inside, where the mirror above the sink is halfway off its hinge. He takes a screwdriver and removes it completely and examines the back for missing screws. She thinks she hears a car coming up the driveway, but when she goes to the window she sees it’s nothing, just some engine across the hedge, probably the neighbor’s lawn mower.

  Back in the bathroom, she finds her father leaning over the tub.

  “False alarm?” he says.

  She nods.

  For several seconds there’s silence.

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “For what?”

  “Thank you for not saying that Amram will be back soon.”

  He gives her a sorrowful look. “Count on me to be the voice of pessimism?”

  She shakes her head. “Just the voice that understands there are things you can’t know.”

  The mirror is leaning against the base of the sink, and she moves it to the wall to steady it. Then she approaches her father, who’s bent over the tub, and gets down on her knees to help him.

  8

  It’s noon in California when Thisbe reaches Wyeth, but he sounds as if he’s still asleep. Calder is napping in the basement. Thisbe sits quietly beside him in the dark listening to his breath draw out.

  “Did I wake you?”

  Wyeth doesn’t answer.

  “It’s noon, Wyeth. Time for lunch.”

  “I was up earlier, but I fell back asleep. It’s good you called. I’m supposed to be studying for both of us.”

  Yet he’s in bed at noon: a laggard on the job.

  “Let me guess. You ordered in pizza.” Wyeth is the cook in their relationship, but he finds it depressing to cook for himself, so when no one else is around he reverts to a college-kid existence: the half-emptied Styrofoam boxes, the takeout menus fanned across the floor.

  “Chicago-style pizza,” Wyeth says. “Deep dish.” As if to reassure her he hasn’t completely gone to pot.

  “In my honor?” Coming east, Thisbe and Calder had a stopover at O’Hare and they spent a few hours wandering around Chicago. Now Wyeth is eating food that tracks where they’ve been. Proof that he’s been thinking about her. Though she worries she hasn’t been thinking about him.

  It’s hot in the basement; there’s no cross-breeze. She removes her running shorts and leaves them in a heap on the floor. Sweat trickles along her arms and down the backs of her knees. Her pulse jangles in her forehead. “Wyeth,” she says, “I haven’t been able to tell them about you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She met Wyeth last fall, her first semester of graduate school, though she likes to say she’s known him for years. Wyeth is an old friend of Lily and Malcolm’s. In an earlier life he was a political organizer; he spent several years registering voters down south. Thirty years late to the ball, is how he puts it: a nineties version of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. But after a few years, the job wore on him. He found the weather in the South oppressive, and he didn’t like making conversation with strangers, much less knocking on their front doors. He was, he discovered, one of those antisocial social people: he liked the idea of a party more than the party itself. And the idea of people more than actual people. “Except, of course, for you.” That was why he became an anthropologist. Ultimately, he preferred Cro-Magnon man.

  As a break from his job, Wyeth spent a summer in D.C., where, to supplement his income, he waited tables at Malcolm’s restaurant. Late at night after the restaurant had closed he and Malcolm would hang out in the kitchen while the dishes were being cleaned, drinking beers and watching the World Cup on TV. Lily would join them when she got off from work and the three of them would ascend the stairs to the patio. Often they were still there at three in the morning; one time they fell asleep outside and were woken up the next day by Malcolm holding plates of eggs Benedict.

  “Do I get paid overtime for sleeping here?” Wyeth asked.

  “Absolutely,” said Malcolm.

  “Waiters have to report for duty in a few hours,” Lily said.

  “I’ll be here for my noontime siesta.”

  And there he was, back at the restaurant in the afternoon, still there late at night after everyone else had left and it was just him, Malcolm, and Lily drinking beers on the patio. “What do you know?” Lily said to Malcolm. “We’ve made a new best friend.”

  One weekend, Leo and Thisbe came through town. Thisbe recalls the bar they went to, thinks she remembers Wyeth himself, though it’s hard to know what she remembers and what she’s been told so many times she simply believes she remembers it. But she takes solace in the fact that she met Wyeth, and in the fact that Leo was there, too. She has come to believe that Leo liked Wyeth, as if Leo’s presence, and his liking Wyeth, were a kind of telescoped approval of what has happened now.

  At the end of the summer, Wyeth returned to Alabama, and he stayed in only sporadic touch with Lily and Malcolm. But when they learned he was moving to Berkeley to study anthropology, Lily said to Thisbe, “You have to meet this old friend of mine.” And to Wyeth she said, “You have to meet my sister-in-law.”

  Thisbe and Wyeth were on the lookout for each other, but they didn’t need to be. It’s a small department; their first semester, they were paired in seminar for oral reports and they took potshots at Clifford Geertz (reactionary) and Margaret Mead (even more reactionary). After class, they would drink lattes at a café near campus until it was time for Thisbe to pick up Calder from day care.

  One time, she invited Wyeth along. She was testing him, she figured, though Calder was two at the time, willing to be held by whoever wished to hold him, and she wasn’t even sure what the test was, what constituted passing and failure.

  They went out for coffee after class one day, and later, strolling down Telegraph Avenue near her apartment, she invited Wyeth up.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re raising your son smack dab across from People’s Park. How’s that for political indoctrination?”

  “I’m raising him across from a fraternity,” Thisbe said. “He gets woken up by hooting in the middle of the night. I tell him there are owls outside his window, but he’s starting to know better.”

  There were photographs of Leo all over the apartment; you couldn’t so much as walk a few paces without bumping into one.

  “Shrine to the late husband?”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s macabre.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Four months.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I knew it was recent. I just …”

  “It’s okay.”

  For a second he just stood there staring at the photos.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have invited you up.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m glad you did.” He was wearing a gray T-shirt in the back of which was a small hole; she could see the movement of his shoulder blades as he walked through her apartment. His hair was the color of cork, and he had the beginnings of a beard, which was darker than that. His shoulders were expansive. All of him was; he filled up every room he entered. He was six foot three, so much larger than Leo. In bed with him for the first time, Thisbe was startled by how much of the mattress he took up; whichever way she rolled, she was pressed to him. She hadn’t imagined she’d end up with someone who looked like Leo, though in the months after his death everyone reminded her of him. Yet that first time with Wyeth, she hadn’t thought about Leo, and realizing this, she panicked.

  That day in her apartment, seeing all those photos, Wyeth said, “What better way to dissuade potential suitors.”

  Yet he hadn’t been dissuaded.

  The next day, Thisbe called Lily. Lily was the worst person she could have called: she was Leo’s sister.
Yet Thisbe felt at the same time that Lily was the only person she could talk to; besides Malcolm, she was the one person in the world who knew both Leo and Wyeth.

  “I went on a date,” she said. She didn’t even mention who the person was, but when Lily said, “Good for you!” she told her it was Wyeth.

  “Does that make it better?” Thisbe said.

  “Better, how?”

  “That you and Malcolm know him? I figure I’m not cheating as much. I’m keeping it in the family.”

  “Cheating?” Lily said. “I want you to date.”

  “But it’s only been four months.”

  “It’s not as if you’re getting remarried.”

  No, Thisbe thought, it certainly wasn’t. But then one date became another became another, and because they were in graduate school and didn’t need to date—their life was a date: they saw each other all the time—their relationship progressed without their even noticing it. That, at least, is what Thisbe tells herself. Lily knows she and Wyeth have been seeing each other, but Thisbe hasn’t told her how serious it has become—hasn’t mentioned, for instance, that Wyeth has asked her to move in with him in the fall. She’s considering doing it, but she has asked Wyeth to wait until she gets back from this trip. With Leo’s memorial coming up, Wyeth—her whole life—has been put on hold.

  She’s still sitting in the basement in her T-shirt and underwear while Calder remains asleep. She hangs up the phone, and now she sees Lily at the top of the stairs.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “A couple hours ago you were in tears. Not everyone starts to cry in the middle of a parlor game.”

  “What can I say? I’m extremely competitive.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that’s what it was.”

  And it wasn’t, of course, though Thisbe herself doesn’t know what it was. A year later, it still happens; she’ll be minding her affairs and she’ll start to cry. There are wells of sadness within her that even she can’t excavate.

  “Let’s take a drive,” Lily says. “My parents will watch Calder.”

  Then they’re in Lily’s van, and they’re driving the route Thisbe and Leo used to take, past Belvoir Terrace, the summer arts camp for girls. It’s late afternoon, but Thisbe can still recall those nighttime drives, the serpentine twist of the pavement, the smell of the woods as the rain came through the open window, the leaves flapping like bats’ wings.

  They enter the Historic Village of Lenox, established in 1767, as they’re reminded on every sign, though the history Thisbe recalls is a history of bad art, which continues, she discovers, unabated. The sidewalks are lined with metal sculpture—of donkeys, of elephants, of human figures playing the tuba and the trombone. They park on Church Street, across from Twigs, where there hangs in the window a child’s T-shirt that reads I’M ONLY DOING THIS UNTIL MY BAND GETS SIGNED.

  Up on Housatonic, they go into the bar where Thisbe used to work. Walking past the patrons watching the Red Sox on TV, she half expects to see the waitresses she knew. But they’re all gone now, another generation of twenty-two-year-olds pouring beer and serving curly fries.

  “Can you believe it?” Lily says. “It’s four in the afternoon and everyone’s already drunk.”

  A girl in a pink halter top has draped herself over the jukebox. She’s fishing through her pockets for change. “This is where Leo and I met,” Thisbe says.

  “It’s where everyone meets everyone,” Lily says. “There’s nowhere else to go in this godforsaken town.”

  They’re sitting at the bar, where the drink specials are written on a chalkboard. Keno cards are lined up behind a set of salt shakers. Thisbe stares down at her forearms laid out on the table, the veins running through them, milky blue.

  “How are you doing?” Lily asks.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Will you make it through these next couple of days?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  A woman threads her way through the crowd, holding a pitcher of beer above her head, her T-shirt riding up her stomach. A waitress delivers a platter of nachos, and a man shouts, “Waitress, taste my soup!” but there’s no soup for the waitress to taste and she just stares at the man dumbly.

  “We could play pool,” Thisbe says. But now that she’s suggested it she doesn’t want to, and she stays seated at the bar, and Lily does, too.

  From across the room, it appears as if someone is waving at Thisbe, but then a girl in tight jeans and a pink cutoff T-shirt emerges from behind her and waves back. A Doors song is playing on the jukebox, and Thisbe has a vague, unsettling feeling from long ago, the taste of beer and a first rock concert, everyone pawing each other. She has never been comfortable in bars. Beneath the surface lie the seeds of repressed violence; she’s always waiting for a fight to break out.

  She flips through the menu. She used to take her customers’ orders and, without a pad or pencil, commit them to memory. Nine or ten customers, food and drink: she never made a mistake. It was her waitress’s legerdemain, the equivalent of balancing a ball on her nose, and she did in fact feel like a trained sea lion. But it earned her better tips and she needed the money. She was storing up cash for the winter, when she would drive to Middletown to visit Leo.

  Above the bar, the chalkboard reads EVERYTHING’S BETTER WITH GUINNESS. Thisbe’s holding a Guinness herself, and her fingers make stripes on the frosted beer mug. She taps her hand against the glass, the beat relentless, like Morse code. A peanut machine stands in the corner, and next to it a Chiclets machine. A hard-to-pinpoint sadness sideswipes her. She looks away, blinking, feeling as if she’s about to cry. On TV, a Red Sox player does something acrobatic in the field, and the crowd emits a collective roar.

  “You should eat something,” Lily says. “Have a hamburger.”

  Thisbe shakes her head.

  “Potato skins?”

  “I’m not hungry.” And she’s not, though she didn’t eat lunch and earlier she was famished.

  Finally, she orders a turkey wrap, which she picks at like a rodent before leaving it uneaten at the side of her plate.

  “I see you’ve kept your fast metabolism.”

  “It’s more like I stopped eating.”

  “When?”

  She shrugs. She’s always been slender, but this past year she’s hardly eaten at all.

  Pool is being played behind them, the balls clanking against each other like nunchucks. A kid in a backwards baseball cap drums his pool cue against his sneaker and a plume of chalk floats through the air. A waitress passes them holding a tray of discarded chicken wings, a gob of blue cheese dripping off it.

  Thisbe goes into the bathroom, where she stands at the sink letting the water wash over her. A sign reads EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK, but someone has crossed out the h in hands and changed the d to a u.

  “Come on,” she tells Lily. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Outside, it has started to rain again. She has an umbrella in the car and she thinks to go get it, but Lily is headed in the other direction.

  On Main Street, they pass the public library and the wine store. Wine and art galleries and hideous puns, Thisbe thinks: that’s what Lenox is.

  And now, sure enough, they walk past Tanglewool, where dresses hang in the window. A dismembered mannequin lies in the gutter. “Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” Lily says.

  In front of Town Hall, they’re flanked on either side by the police station and the fire station. “Should we take a drive?”

  “Where to?” Thisbe says.

  “We can go to Stockbridge and see the Norman Rockwell Museum. We can continue on to Great Barrington.” Across the street, they can make out Loeb’s market and the health-food store.

  “Actually, a museum doesn’t sound so bad. It’s better than going to Laos to sleep under mosquito nets.”

  “Why?” Lily says. “Is that what you’re planning to do?�
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  “I’m an anthropologist, so I have to do fieldwork. Knowing me, I’ll end up with a case of dengue fever.”

  “I’d make a terrible anthropologist,” Lily says. “I’m the world’s worst hypochondriac.”

  “You can’t think about those things.” Though Thisbe does, in fact, think about them. She’s putting on a tough-guy act. It’s as if now that Leo has gone it has devolved upon her to be the reckless one. Merely getting a PhD could be considered reckless, the academic job market being what it is. She suspects Marilyn and David would have preferred she go to law school. Her own parents probably would have preferred law school, too. Everyone, she thinks, prefers law school, except for the people who actually go to law school; anyway, that was never in the cards. She’d been preparing to go to graduate school when Leo died, so she feels as if she’s following their plan, carrying out their joint venture.

  “Would Wyeth go too?” Lily asks.

  “Where?”

  “To Laos. To get dengue fever.”

  “Are you kidding me? He’d be leading the brigade.”

  “Really? I don’t remember him being a daredevil.”

  “No more so than any other guy.” So often it’s that way, Thisbe thinks, the man with his fantasies, his pleasing delusions, the woman left to draw the reins. She can see it even now with Wyeth, so different from Leo but who, like Leo, relies on her as ballast. No, we can’t go to Belize for the weekend. It’s expensive and we need injections and I have a three-year-old to take care of. Is that, she wonders, why women were created? To allow men to say “I would have done it if only she’d let me”?