The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  Now that the service is over, Thisbe greets people she hasn’t seen since Leo’s funeral, some she hasn’t seen since their wedding, only now she’s gotten the two mixed up and she can’t remember whom she saw when.

  She finds Calder down in the game room, where he’s playing foosball against himself, twisting the handles around and around so that the players keep doing somersaults. He stands beside the woman who brought him downstairs.

  “Thank you for rescuing him,” Thisbe says. “And me, too, while you were at it.”

  “It was nothing. I got him away from the madding crowd. It was the least I could do.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “Hello there.” Jules has sneaked up from behind Thisbe and is standing next to her now.

  “Jules!” she says, hugging him. “I hadn’t even realized you were coming, and then I saw you in the crowd!”

  “Oh, come on,” he says. “I never would have missed this.”

  Thisbe tries to introduce Calder to Jules (“Jules was Daddy’s best friend”), but Calder doesn’t even look up from his foosball game, whose players he continues to spin and spin without regard for their kicking the ball.

  Thisbe steps back to have a look at Jules. His hair is blond as it always was, but he has cut it short, and it’s starting to grow gray at the temples. “How are you, Jules?”

  “I’m okay, I guess. It’s been a tough year.”

  “For all of us.”

  “I mean, I knew that guy when we were in first grade.”

  “He lived for you,” she says. “He lived for all his friends in Lenox.” She points at his feet. “Look at you, Jules. Your shoelaces are untied.” And she remembers how Jules could never be bothered to tie his shoelaces, and how Leo made a point of stepping on them. She imagines Jules as a boy, imagines Leo as well, giving each other noogies and dead arms, kneeing each other in the thigh, shouting “Charlie Horse!” as they did so, as if by naming the act they were absolved of blame. All that sanctioned violence decked out as camaraderie so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. And an image comes to her, of Leo and Jules in the mall on some bank of escalators, running up the down escalators and down the up ones, nearly colliding with the other shoppers. It’s as if the memory comes from earlier, and she’s been boomeranged back to when she wasn’t around, trespassing on their former lives.

  The summer she met Leo, Jules was still trying to get into movies for half price. At the local diner, where he and Leo would convene for a noontime breakfast, Jules would flirt with the waitress by insisting on ordering the kids’ meal. “More fish sticks,” he said. “And chocolate milk. And could you possibly get me a box of crayons?” They acted like children when they were together, probably because they’d met when they were six, a group of boys who spent the summer with each other, all of them parting ways when the school year started and reuniting like sparrows every July, claiming that school, their friends back home, meant nothing to them and they lived only for the summer and for each other, when they would return to Lenox. In Leo’s case, it was true. He spoke of his friends from Lenox with near-reverence, no one more so than Jules, who lived the rest of the year in the suburbs of Boston and who would remain Leo’s best friend until he died. It was all guys—five, six, seven of them—and even once they were older and had left for college, it seemed there was no room for girls. Early on, Thisbe discovered that by dating Leo she was also dating his group of friends and she was supposed to win their favor. But she didn’t want to appeal to her boyfriend’s buddies, some of whom she liked and some of whom she didn’t. As it happened, they all liked her. She’s always been good at being one of the boys, and she was especially fond of Jules.

  Now Calder has lain down on the floor beside them; it seems that he’s actually fallen asleep.

  “He has your eyes,” Jules says.

  “Jules, he’s sleeping.”

  “Your eyelids.”

  “You sound just like Leo.” That night at the bar, the first time they met, Leo sidled over to her by the nachos and beer and said, “I like your eyes.”

  Thisbe laughed. He would need to think of a better come-on than that. “How about my nose?”

  “That’s good, too.”

  “And my ears?”

  “I like those also.”

  “Seriously,” Jules says. “He’s your spitting image.”

  “It’s funny,” she says, “because I’ve always thought he looked like Leo.” Though in a way she and Leo looked alike.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s your typical three-year-old,” she says. “He’s the king of scatology. Everything’s a poop joke with him.”

  “Tell me something else.”

  “He’s just like Leo. He has absolutely no sense of direction. One time, I took him to a party with my anthropologist friends and he kept bumping into the mirrors. Everyone thought he was drunk.”

  Now Marilyn tells the crowd it’s time for the unveiling, and Thisbe thinks this is a reprise. Because it was only a year ago when she was here, sitting up front at Leo’s funeral, then on to the graveyard, the limousines flashing their garish lights. And everything she’s been feeling these last minutes, that sense of solace, of things opening up, back with Jules again, even laughing a little: it’s all gone now, and a gloom settles over her once more.

  She drives with Marilyn in her rental car, and she feels that she can’t look at her and can’t avoid her either. They’re two chickens in a coop, and she stares straight ahead, navigating along the twisting roads, and the word comes to her, serpentine, serpentine, as if someone is shooting at her.

  A car horn goes off in the distance. A cow looks up from the side of the road, blank-faced, cow-faced, chewing its cud.

  Now all that’s left is the laying of the headstone, which the graveyard workers do without ceremony, and it seems no one in the family wants ceremony, either. There it is, removed from its wrapping, unveiled to them, Thisbe thinks, and of course it is; that’s why they call it an unveiling.

  LEO FRANKEL, HUSBAND, FATHER, BROTHER, SON

  APRIL 10, 1972–JULY 4, 2004

  “We forgot to say kaddish,” someone says. Amram was supposed to say kaddish at the memorial, but he wasn’t there. There are thirty, forty people standing around Leo’s grave, more than half of them Jewish, but no one besides Noelle knows how to say kaddish. Lily says,

  “Will you say kaddish, Noelle?”

  Noelle has never said kaddish before; even during Leo’s shivah, Amram recited it for her. There has been a movement among the Orthodox to allow women to say kaddish, but Noelle isn’t part of that movement. Even before she became religious, she wasn’t a feminist, yet she feels like a crypto-feminist as she realizes that were she to say kaddish she’d probably stumble over the words. She speaks and reads Hebrew as well as Amram does, but she has never been called on to lead the prayer service. As she stands before the crowd, she’s surprised to feel she’s been kept under wraps.

  She does, in fact, falter as she begins, especially since she’s reciting from memory. And the kaddish is in Aramaic, the language of the Talmud, which she never studied. But she presses on, reminding herself that it doesn’t matter if she makes a mistake because no one will know besides her. For a second she feels loosed from something, and when she thinks that Amram may not be coming back, it’s with less panic than she felt earlier. If she has to, she’ll take the boys back to Israel on her own. She’ll find a way to manage.

  When she finishes chanting, everyone stands quietly in the graveyard, waiting for what comes next. But there’s nothing more to do. So they form a single line moving away from the grave, and one by one they get into their cars.

  13

  Thisbe drives home with Marilyn and Calder, none of them speaking; a heaviness corrodes the air. They move along Main Street, slowed by the holiday traffic, and when Thisbe turns on the radio no sound comes in.

  They get to the house, and Marilyn goes upstairs and This
be and Calder go downstairs, and soon the other cars have arrived as well and everyone disperses to their quarters. The house feels empty, yet it’s overcome at the same time by a low-grade clamor. Thisbe thinks she hears noise upstairs, but when she goes to search she can’t find anyone.

  In the garden, the sprinklers have gone off of their accord, and now, on the second floor, a bath is being run. The whole house is leaking water. In the living room, she finds the TV on, but no one is watching it. The news is playing: a pastiche of the holiday. Fireworks are being readied by the National Parks Service. A man is stoking a barbecue pit. President Bush is presiding over a service at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Outside on the porch her nephews are spraying each other with Calamine lotion. Now it’s sunscreen they’re spraying. Soon Calder has joined the fray.

  When he comes back inside, he looks like a ghost. A pink ghost, actually. Thisbe didn’t realize they’d invented pink sunscreen. Or maybe it’s pink Calamine lotion. Whatever it is, he’s covered with it.

  She takes him into the bathroom and cleans him up, and now, back in the basement they’ve been sharing, wearing a new set of clothes, he sits down to the computer. She has told him he can compose an e-mail, but since he’s only three, he simply pounds on the keys. Seated on the bed with the screen open before him, he regards her computer with a glum familiarity that suggests he’s been composing e-mails for years. When he was two, he insisted on having his own cell phone, so she gave him a phone that no longer worked. But he wanted an actual phone, something that lit up and made real cell phone noises. Now he wants his own laptop. Like most children, he loves buttons—what, Thisbe wonders, did the cavemen do?—but he seems especially preoccupied with them. This disappoints her—she wanted to raise a humanist!—though she takes solace in the thought that it will be good to have a handyman around the house.

  She connects him to the Internet and goes upstairs, and when she reaches the landing she sees Noelle in the foyer putting on a pair of rollerblades. “Are you going rollerblading?”

  Noelle gives her half a smile.

  “Right,” she says. “You’re putting on rollerblades, but you’re going for a swim.”

  “Do you want to come along?”

  “Really?”

  “You look like you could stand to get out of the house. I know I can.”

  “Calder’s on the Internet,” she says. “By the time we get back, he’ll have hacked into the Pentagon.”

  “My mother will watch over him. Come on.” Noelle is bent over in the hall closet, fishing around among the rain boots and beach towels and shuttlecocks and running shoes. She turns back to Thisbe. “What size are you?”

  “An eight.”

  “Here,” she says. “These might fit you.” She tosses a pair of rollerblades at Thisbe’s feet.

  Noelle is at the foot of the stairs now, skating forward and back. “You should be a good partner, a California girl like you.” She bends over and touches her toes, then skates around the foyer in circles.

  They skate down Cliffwood into town. Thisbe may be a California girl, but the first time she skated was when she was four and her mother took her to the ice rink at Rockefeller Center in the shadow of that year’s Christmas tree. Bowdoin had a women’s club ice hockey team, which required less skill than enthusiasm, but she had enough of both to play for a couple of years. She could skate backwards and could whack at the puck with sufficient accuracy to send it skidding toward the goal. But what she liked best about ice hockey, about skating in general, was when she put her shoes back on. Those first few steps: it was as if she were being transported on helium. She feels the same way when she emerges from a sauna. Air! It’s like the world is saying, “Come take me!”

  When they reach town, the sidewalks have been taken over by window-shoppers, so they step out onto the street and skate between the cars. If the cyclists can do it, why can’t they?

  “Where are we going?” Thisbe asks.

  Noelle doesn’t know. She’s skating forward now, with Thisbe behind her; they’re weaving between the stalled cars.

  It requires getting used to, Thisbe thinks, the sight of Noelle on rollerblades. As she moves along Main Street with a breeze at her back, Noelle’s denim skirt bulges as if inflated with water, and her kerchief, knotted behind her head, flutters like a pennant. Cars pass them, belching out smoke, and the sounds of traffic make it hard for them to hear each other. Now Thisbe moves forward so they’re skating abreast. Noelle crouches and comes up and crouches again, so that it looks as if she’s doing knee bends.

  It’s six in the evening now. The fireworks will start in a couple of hours. And at seven o’clock, James Taylor will perform on the Tanglewood stage. On the corner of Main and Walker two teenage boys in Lenox T-shirts are holding up signs selling tickets to the concert.

  “They should sell those tickets to their own grandparents,” Noelle says. “How old is James Taylor, anyway? Sixty? For all I know, he’s a grandparent himself.”

  “From heroin addict to grandparent,” Thisbe says. “So there’s hope for us all.”

  “If there’s hope for me,” Noelle says, “there’s hope for anyone.”

  It’s an hour before the concert, but already the traffic is thick with exhaust, with the smell of salami and pâté, of macaroni and cheese, pickles, mashed potatoes, and scones. The stuff of summer picnics, Thisbe thinks, recalling weekends with Leo, wandering past Kripalu to Tanglewood, where they would camp out on the lawn while the string musicians held practice. They used to fall asleep in the grass with their turkey sandwiches and watermelon spread across their stomachs: their own human picnic bench. Then Leo, waking up to the sound of the cellists practicing, would say wistfully, “Clarissa used to promise she was going to play here and she’d get us free tickets.”

  In Lilac Park, more James Taylor tickets are being scalped. “Beer here!” Noelle calls out, and now she and Thisbe are skating down Sunset to where the residential streets have been emptied out. Here they can move unimpeded in either direction, going past house after house, all those lawns flagged out front with their green Berkshire Eagle boxes.

  “Do you rollerblade a lot?” Thisbe asks.

  “Whenever I can,” Noelle says. “It’s the only exercise I get besides carrying my kids. What about you?”

  “Not in ages.”

  “Rollerblading is my Prozac,” Noelle says. “If I didn’t have it, I’d have to take the real thing.”

  “Would you consider it?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “If it were permitted.”

  “It’s against Jewish law?” It feels like a stupid question, the way most of her questions about Judaism feel stupid, but then it’s hard for Thisbe to guess what’s prohibited and what isn’t. Just as often, she’s thrown by what’s allowed. She recalls learning that, if slaughtered properly, venison is kosher. Deer!

  “The problem isn’t Jewish law,” Noelle says. “It’s Amram. He doesn’t believe in taking drugs.”

  “But he wouldn’t be the one taking them.”

  Noelle thinks to say Amram sets the rules, but she’s never thought of it so starkly, and it discomfits her to think of it that way now, so she doesn’t say anything. “Anyway, he’s not here to tell me what to do.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “And he may never be. For all I know, he’s never coming back.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Honestly, Thisbe, I have no idea. But when my mother promises me he’ll come back soon, it sounds condescending, not to mention stupid. So don’t go giving me false assurances either unless you know something I don’t.” Noelle skates into a driveway and Thisbe follows, and soon they emerge onto Yokun Avenue.

  “So you haven’t heard from him at all?” Thisbe says.

  Noelle shakes her head. “He’s been gone over a day now. You can’t tell me Leo ever did anything like that.”

  “Not unless you count flying off to Iraq.”

  “I don’t
.”

  They’ve circled back to Lilac Park, where they stand unmoving on their rollerblades while beside them, on a bench, a couple is giving their rottweiler puppy scraps of a roast beef sandwich.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can take Amram.”

  Thisbe’s quiet.

  “I know what everyone’s saying about him. And about me too as a result.”

  “Well, you’re in good company,” Thisbe says. “I can only imagine what they’re saying about me.”

  It’s true, Noelle thinks. She feels an alliance with Thisbe: the pariahs among her family, the ones cast overboard. “Honestly, Thisbe, could you ever imagine yourself with someone like Amram?”

  No, Thisbe thinks, but then there aren’t a lot of people she could imagine herself with. And she understands Amram’s appeal. He has a kind of bullying charisma that would be more compelling if he didn’t always act so aggrieved. “De gustibus,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It’s Latin for taste.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning love is particular. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand why I love the people I love.”

  “You’re talking about Leo?”

  “For one.”

  “Everyone loved Leo.”

  “Not everyone. But I loved him, and that’s all that mattered.”

  As the time for the concert has drawn near, the streets have, in fact, started to fill with grandparent types. Or grandparent types trying not to be grandparent types. Women James Taylor’s age in muumuus and peasant dresses, men in ponytails, too old, Thisbe thinks, to be men in ponytails—and she lives in Berkeley, the world’s capital of men too old to be in ponytails.

  “Come on,” Noelle says. “Let’s head down to the show.”

  “But we don’t have tickets.”

  “We can lurk around the edges and watch the crowd. I hated James Taylor when I was growing up. We can see if I still hate him.”

  They thread their way past the row of stopped cars, and soon Noelle veers off into the Tanglewood Institute, where the grounds are lined with trees and where a couple of musicians walk past them now, carrying trombones. Noelle skates on her own, back and forth along the concrete, before coming to a stop next to Thisbe, who has settled herself onto the grass across from a sign that says BOSTON UNIVERSITY.