The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  She took on extra hours at the restaurant, and when that wasn’t enough, she began to let Leo pay for her. She didn’t like doing this—it went against her sensibilities—but he insisted he could afford it. He reminded her of Gretchen’s gift; there was, he implied, the promise of more. Nothing explicit, certainly, but he was always saying how wealthy Gretchen was. Obscenely wealthy, was how he put it. He seemed to think Gretchen herself was obscene, but that didn’t stop him from cashing her checks. He believed all would work out well, which struck Thisbe as the bearing of the rich. It certainly wasn’t how she saw things, having grown up with a social worker mother and an economics professor father—and a Marxist economics professor at that, who, perhaps because of his Marxism, or because he was impolitic, never managed to get tenure.

  Yet Thisbe ignored all this. She was drawn to the fantasy of an alternate life in New York. She would waitress twenty hours a week and spend the rest of her time conjugating Italian verbs and practicing her piano scales, perfecting her tikka masala and Rogan Josh.

  Gretchen’s gift must have been in the low six figures, because soon the money had run out. At a restaurant one day, Thisbe realized she didn’t have enough money to pay for lunch. The manager made her hand over her driver’s license and coat while she went out to find an ATM. It was twenty degrees outside, and she’d been forced to leave her parka as collateral! When she told Leo what happened, he said, “It’s lucky they didn’t make you leave your shoes!” He appeared to think the story was funny, but she found it a humiliation.

  After that, she began to carry forty dollars in a separate fold of her wallet, reserved for just such an emergency. When Leo was a boy, back when New York was more perilous, land of graffiti and crack deals and extinguished streetlights, his parents had made him do the same thing. Mugger money, he called it. Though it wasn’t being mugged Thisbe was afraid of. She was alone in the world, alone financially. She and Leo were married now, but they were still poor. The only reason they had health insurance was that their parents paid for it, and counting on her new grandmother-in-law—was there even such a term?—was folly.

  So she quit waitressing, abandoned piano lessons, Italian, the things she loved, and took a job with a political nonprofit. The pay was poor, but at least she had a salary. And when that salary didn’t seem like enough, she started to work for an advertising firm. Daughter of the Marxist economics professor, resident of Santa Cruz, she found herself at twenty-nine working on Madison Avenue; it was perhaps the single job she was least suited for. But in some ways that was the point. Working in advertising proved she was unsentimental; it meant she had grown up.

  Yet she hated advertising even more than she’d expected to. She was paid to convince people they needed things they didn’t; her job was to make them feel bad about themselves. Placed on a beer campaign—she thanked God she didn’t have to shill for the cigarette companies—she did her work dutifully, but she went home feeling sullied and, in what she later realized was subconscious penance, she stopped drinking beer, first from the company whose campaign she worked on and then from all beer companies. She longed for the courses she’d taken when she first got to New York, and, even more, for college, when all she did was take courses. She’d studied anthropology at Bowdoin, and on the subway to work she carried in her tote bag the recent catalogs from the university presses, which she would spread across her desk during lunch. Fifty-five dollars for the latest volume of anthropological theory! But she could afford it now; she had a real job. So she ordered the book, thinking of it as a reward to herself. Holed up in her office while her coworkers went out to lunch, she would lift her sandwich to her mouth, elbows pressed against the pages of her book, mayonnaise dripping on Hélène Cixous.

  In the previous year, Leo had published articles in GQ and Esquire; he’d traveled to Somalia and written about it for the Times magazine. He’d recently been hired as a reporter for Newsday. He had a salary now; their parents were no longer paying for their health insurance. Maybe, Thisbe thought, she could consider graduate school. She could go to Columbia or NYU, perhaps even to Yale; New Haven was only an hour and a half away.

  A month before the war started, a man came to their apartment building selling life insurance. When Thisbe saw him from the window, she thought, Oh, please. The only thing people sold door to door any longer was drugs, certainly on their block off Grand Street, where jittery teenagers slunk from alley to alley and dark cars stopped to disgorge their passengers, only to scoop them back up a few minutes later. When Thisbe and Leo moved in, the realtor had described their block as in transition, but now that seemed at best like wishful thinking, at worst like an outright lie. So when the life insurance salesman rang their bell, she refused to let him in.

  But he left some literature under their door, and afterward she leafed through it. The war would start soon; it had been ordained, she believed, from the moment the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush. He would find a way to get there, and Leo would find a way to get there with him. If it hadn’t been Iraq, it would have been Afghanistan, or the West Bank, or Sudan, or Zimbabwe. Thisbe would array these locations across her mental atlas, imagining Leo flying there, because he would fly there, because there would always be people like Leo, drawn to danger like a moth to light.

  One evening, she dropped the life insurance brochure onto his lap. Instantly, he understood what she was thinking. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Are you saying you doubt me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t go.”

  But she couldn’t ask him to do that.

  She continues to believe that, if she’d insisted, he wouldn’t have gone. But it would have leached the spirit from him. Growing up, he couldn’t simply smoke pot like any reasonable American teenager. He had to study it, grow it, turn it into art. He took up badminton in high school, and before long he was captain of his school team. At college he majored in philosophy, and for a time all he could talk about was Wittgenstein and Heidegger. And when he tired of philosophy, when he tired in general of going to class and started to spend his nights at the Wesleyan Argus, where he’d been named editor-in-chief, he brought the same monomaniacal discipline to bear on the writing and editing of what he was determined to make the best college newspaper in the United States. Later, when he flew off to some battlefield, Thisbe said, “How about you do something a little easier on the nerves?”

  “You mean your nerves?”

  She laughed, but he was right. If he needed mayhem, she would have preferred it if he wrote for the police blotter. But he wasn’t interested in the police blotter. And, truth be told, neither was she. They talked about retiring early and traveling around the world; they would die without a home, two octogenarian backpackers falling from a cliff in the Himalayas.

  After Leo was killed, when Thisbe recalled his words, If you don’t want me to go, I won’t go, it wasn’t her failure to say Don’t go that assailed her; it was, rather, that she’d doubted him. She feared Leo would die, and so he’d gone ahead and done it.

  Other people—Marilyn comes to mind—wanted revenge. If there was a chance of success, she’d have quit her job and spent the rest of her life prosecuting Bush for war crimes. But Thisbe didn’t want a penny out of what had happened to Leo; it would have compromised her grieving. If she had taken out a life insurance policy, she’d have refused to cash it in.

  A few weeks after Leo died, living alone in their old apartment, she agreed to go to lunch with Gretchen at an expensive restaurant on the Upper East Side. She didn’t know Gretchen well and, frankly, Gretchen scared her. There was her money, of course. And there was her temper, which was a thing of lore among the Frankels, how Gretchen, caneless, alert, could simply raise her voice and everyone would fall into line. Over prime rib and a whiskey sour, Gretchen laid out her coterie of powerful admirers, the slights and indignities she’d been forced to endure. The previ
ous week, she’d shared an elevator ride with Caroline Kennedy, and though Gretchen had met her more than once, Kennedy ignored her. “She was talking on her cell phone,” Gretchen said, “and she didn’t even acknowledge I was there.” Cell phones led to rudeness, Gretchen believed. On this Thisbe didn’t disagree.

  “How are you doing?” Gretchen asked.

  “I’m okay, I guess.”

  “It must be hard.”

  Thisbe nodded.

  Gretchen was silent, and in that silence Thisbe realized it must be hard for Gretchen too, that when Thisbe lost a husband Gretchen lost a grandson. Gretchen had been at Leo’s funeral, but Thisbe couldn’t remember having seen her there, could recall nothing from that day besides the dark casket draped on the podium, the thrum of processioners, their heads lowered, as she sat beside Leo’s sisters, unable to quiet the relentless beating of her heart. “How are you doing, Gretchen?”

  Gretchen stared down at her whiskey sour. She’d grown up before people spoke about their feelings, and she didn’t feel comfortable doing so. She glanced at Thisbe, then looked away.

  Although none of the other diners were as old as Gretchen, everyone was of a certain age and means, lingering over their snapper and Dover sole, gesturing to the busboy with the same clipped impatience Gretchen displayed when her water glass had been drained, bearing an air of entitlement that Thisbe knew she could never possess even if she wanted to. It was a seafood restaurant, and on the wall across from her a swordfish was mounted. She had eaten at expensive restaurants before, certainly during her first couple of years in New York, but those had been noisy downtown establishments, and Gretchen preferred restaurants like this one, where stockinged women wore pins clipped to their breasts and the men had on jackets and neckties.

  “How was your food?” Gretchen asked.

  “It was delicious,” Thisbe said. “Thank you for inviting me.” She felt awkward saying this, as if she were being forced to engage in politesse. But it was true. She was happy to be here, happy to be with Gretchen because she was Leo’s grandmother, the way that being with anyone who knew Leo helped dull the pain even as it made it sharper.

  “You’re a widow now,” Gretchen said.

  Later, it occurred to Thisbe that this was something she and Gretchen shared: Gretchen was a widow three times over. But at the time she was startled by the savage, icy precision of the word. She’d never heard herself described this way before, and sitting across from Gretchen, whose hair, white as coconut, was up in a beehive, looking as always as if she’d just come from the beautician, her dark silk pants suit without a wrinkle, the scarf around her neck knotted just so, Thisbe stared into her tiramisu and started to cry. She was thirty-two years old; most of her friends weren’t even married yet, and she was already a widow. She was on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that felt alien to her, in a restaurant that felt even more alien, where everyone was dressed up for lunch, and she’d made the mistake of wearing blue jeans; she’d half expected to be turned back at the door, if not by the maître d’, then by Gretchen herself. She felt ugly, her blond hair pasted to her forehead; snot was coming out of her nose, she was crying and crying, blubbering into her dessert.

  “I want to give you some money,” Gretchen said.

  “Oh, Gretchen, I can’t let you do that.”

  From her pocketbook, Gretchen produced an envelope with her name embossed on it. “You’re alone,” she said. “You have a baby to take care of.”

  “Gretchen, please.”

  Gretchen reached across the table and handed her the envelope.

  “What about the girls?”

  “What girls?”

  “Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle. Are you giving them money, too?” How, Thisbe wondered, could she accept money from Gretchen when they weren’t related by blood, when, blood aside, their connection felt flimsy. She had been married to Leo for only five years, and during that time they’d rarely seen Gretchen.

  “The girls will be fine,” Gretchen said. “You’re the one who needs my help.”

  “So the money would be for Calder?”

  “It’s not for me to decide.”

  She would lose this battle, Thisbe understood, the way everyone lost to Gretchen. No matter what Gretchen said, the money was intended for Calder. If Thisbe hadn’t been the mother of Leo’s son, Gretchen probably wouldn’t have even taken her out to lunch.

  She has no memory of what she did next, of anything, really, from the moment she left the restaurant until she got home. She convinced herself she had refused the money, but when she awoke the next morning the envelope was still in her coat pocket, in the envelope with Gretchen’s name embossed on it.

  Two hundred thousand dollars! Standing in the kitchen, holding the check with both hands as if the very number made it too heavy to lift, she began to cry. All her life, she had remained ignorant of money. It was a combination of laziness and futility at math, along with the idea, passed on tacitly by her parents, that excessive focus on money was deserving of contempt, that if you knew too much about money you knew too little about everything else. Leo had been in charge of their finances, and when he died she panicked. She bought a book about money management and enrolled in a one-day seminar on financial planning, which taught her just enough to make her realize how little she knew.

  Was it even possible to cash a $200,000 check? If she deposited it, she’d be regarded as a fraud. She’d felt fraudulent enough eating at that restaurant with Gretchen, where the bill had come to $150.

  A month later, when she got to Berkeley, the check was still in her wallet. If she waited long enough, it would be void. How long? Ninety days? A hundred and eighty days? The only thing that made her deposit it was that Gretchen would realize she hadn’t done so and she couldn’t bear to face her.

  There are college savings plans now, and educational IRAs, but she hasn’t invested in those. She could put the money in U.S. Treasury Bonds or C.D.s, tying it up to get a better interest rate, but she hasn’t done that either. She simply deposited the money into the same checking account into which her monthly graduate stipend gets deposited, and then, not wanting to mix the two up, she opened a second account, just for the money Gretchen gave her. “I haven’t told anyone about this,” she says to Lily.

  “Not even Wyeth?”

  She shakes her head. She certainly hasn’t told Marilyn and David, convinced that they will feel as she does, that the money isn’t rightfully hers. She hasn’t even told her own parents. She has two hundred thousand dollars plus interest collecting at the headquarters of Wells Fargo and her parents are helping pay for Calder’s preschool! They’re sending her additional checks whenever they can find an excuse—her birthday, Calder’s birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day—trying to make it seem as if it’s not outright charity. She feels terrible about this, and she keeps a careful tally of the money, promising herself she’ll pay them back. “I haven’t benefited from it,” she tells Lily. “Not even a penny.”

  “Then you’re crazier than I thought.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a starving graduate student, Thisbe. I should have bought you more than a tank of gas. I should have paid for your therapist.”

  “Who are you to talk? You don’t take money from Gretchen either.”

  “But if I were a graduate student—”

  “Oh, stop it with the graduate student, already! It’s insulting!”

  “And if I were a widow with a three-year-old to take care of, I wouldn’t have so much pride.”

  “Is that what you think this is? Pride?”

  “You don’t?”

  “You’re her granddaughter, Lily.”

  “And you’re—”

  “I lived in the same city as her for years and I hardly ever saw her. I’m just some girl who married into the family.”

  “You’re the mother of her great-grandson, is what you are.”

  “Who, a year later, is shacked up with another guy.”

  “A
h,” Lily says. “So that’s the issue. Wyeth.”

  “It’s one of them. I don’t want the privilege of receiving Gretchen’s gift. Or the burden of it, either. I’m alone now, and I want to do things on my own. You of all people should understand that.”

  “And so you’ll deprive Calder in order to make your point?”

  “Calder will manage.”

  “How?”

  “The same way everyone else manages who doesn’t have two hundred thousand dollars in his name. Which is to say the rest of the world.”

  “So what are you going to do with the money? Just let it sit there?”