The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  10

  November 6, 2000

  The 9th of Heshvan, 5761

  Eleven p.m. The interior of the apartment was pleasantly dim. A light, bluish halo enveloped the screen of the computer. Andrew’s fingers skim lightly over the keyboard and grip the elongated mouse. He is checking his e-mails for the third time that day. What an enchanting new medium, so captivatingly noncommittal! Words appear from nowhere and vanish into thin air, lacking the least physical dimension. Throwing a letter into a wastepaper basket, let alone tearing it up or shredding it, was a positive, almost declarative act compared to deleting an e-mail, whose text disappeared without a trace at the slightest, all but immaterial touch of a fingertip. Important and trivial messages, personal correspondence and junk mail—Andrew clicked away at the keyboard, effortlessly sifting and sorting his communications.

  A yellow icon blinked: important mail. Rachel. It was Rachel. She was sitting right now just like him, in her charming little apartment in Princeton, answering her mail. Hi, Dad. The department is sending me to New York for a three-day conference. Don’t worry, I have a place to stay on the East Side, it belongs to friends who are out of town. Let’s get together if you can find the time for me. Love you, Rachel. P.S. Take a look at this link when you get a chance.

  Andrew smiled. The department was sending her? Not bad. Her offhanded way of letting him know amused him. From time to time, partly to celebrate their joint interest in contemporary culture and partly to challenge him by testing the boundaries between them, she sent him links to unconventional and even provocative sites, and before beginning one of the virtual tête-à-têtes they engaged in, he double-clicked on the blue outline of her latest selection. The computer whirred faintly; the screen went momentarily blank, then logged on to a strange, disturbing site entitled Back to the Foreskin. Andrew paged down it, his discomfort growing as he scanned its text and images, the photo journal, kept for the past half year, of a thirty-eight-year-old Jewish man from Brooklyn who had recorded his persistent efforts to retrieve his lost foreskin and become again what he called “a whole man.” In the spirit of the times, his pursuit of the holy grail of epidermal restoration had become a psychological and spiritual quest exhibiting every up and down, revelation and blank moment, euphoria and depression. Andrew had to squirm. The ritualization of selfhood in modern society, with its compulsive public exposure of what once had been private, was totally bizarre. This particular pilgrim was touchingly pathetic: an emasculated male, an overgrown infant with the tenderized flesh of a castrated bull whose sole interest was his puny little circumcised penis. The site was illustrated with odious close-ups of the longed-for, never-again-to-be-had flap of skin, whose strange membranous inflorescence made Andrew think more of a female sexual organ than a male one.

  Andrew shut down the site. He felt soiled, intruded on. What on earth compelled her to send him this vile link? To his dismay, he found himself wondering—no, not really wondering, it was just an idle thought—whether Rachel’s boyfriend, Tom, was circumcised. True, he came from a Catholic family, but weren’t nearly all Americans circumcised nowadays?

  Ridiculous. What possessed him to think about such things? Chasing away the annoying gnat of introspection, he decided to say nothing about the link and wrote:

  Hi, sweetie.

  It’s great that you’re coming. I’m sure you’ll be very busy, but we must find time to have lunch or a quick coffee together, just the two of us. I need some quality time with my little girl.

  Love you,

  Dad

  11

  You know, all that fake warmth, that ‘we must find time to have lunch together,’ is just his way of saying that that’s all the time he intends to give me.” Rachel and Tom were in bed, nestled under the sheets. “And the way he puts it, as if the one who’s so busy is me! It’s always been like that. He’ll never say it’s him who has no time or finds it inconvenient. That’s not his style. His method is to make you feel embarrassed for wanting to bother him. It’s passive-aggressive, which I don’t think anyone has ever told him or even thought of. But that’s what he is: passive-aggressive! And you know what’s the most amazing part of it? No one is ever angry at him! No one can be, because no one sees what he’s doing. I mean, we all feel it, but we can’t put it into words—not when he’s so nice and sexy and sensitive and such a good listener. And that includes me. I play along with him like everyone else. We all belong to the prestigious little club of his protégées who know the rules. We do the work for him, we protect him from our own demands, we make an ice circle around him and guard it as though we were its priests. Did I ever tell you about his doctorate? He finished writing it when I was a baby, right after I was born. Would you believe it? The last act of the dissertation, the one that’s famous for its nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, and divorces, when suddenly, a week before your deadline, you’re handed a ten-page list of required corrections, and then at the last second, after you’ve made them all, a request to change the typeface of the chapter headings and renumber them, and, oh, yes, the margins need to be one-point-two and not one-point-three inches . . . and there he is, sitting up all night in their little apartment, two days after I was born, surrounded by baby bottles, pacifiers, and dirty diapers, rewriting his fucking footnotes. What powers of concentration, right? Well, let me tell you something. It’s not concentration, it’s sheer egotism. He doesn’t see anyone, no one exists for him but himself. And do you think my mom ever complained about it? That she ever felt neglected or marginalized? Forget it! If you ask her about those days, she’ll tell you they were the best of their marriage, an absolute golden age.”

  Tom nodded silently. He didn’t exactly get it. He had grown up in a lower middle-class Irish home whose tough, devoted mother chain-smoked menthol cigarettes, made supper seven times a week, and knew at any given moment just where all her six children were and what they were up to. Passive-aggressive parents lay outside his experience.

  12

  November 16, 2000

  The 19th of Heshvan, 5761

  Ten p.m. Outside it was raining, but the apartment was warm and cozy. Set against the easy patter of the rain, the soft light of the floor lamps suggested a crackling fireplace, which the apartment never had. Andrew was at work at his desk, debating whether to use a quotation from a New Yorker interview with Robert Altman as the epigraph for an article that he hoped to finish by the following afternoon. “Culture and politics have become incestuous,” Altman had said about Fellini’s Dolce Vita, which was interesting, definitely interesting, but how much did it communicate? Never mind, he could put it off until tomorrow. A good epigraph could springboard an entire piece, even if you erased it afterward. Recently, Andrew had been even more prolific than usual. He had to publish a lot this year, especially in light of his increasingly likely appointment as director of the Asch Interdisciplinary Program in Contemporary Cultural Studies—a prestigious, handsomely funded enterprise considered by many to be the department’s flagship.

  He glanced at his watch. Ann Lee should be back by ten thirty, and he wanted to finish at least one more paragraph before then. Taking a quick look at Mark Eisenstein’s On the Nature of the Fantastic, he returned the book facedown to his desk and went on writing:

  Fantasy is not necessarily that which we yearn for but never dare realize—this is the vulgar and trivial meaning of the word. Fantasy is the testing of the boundaries of possibility in both its positive and negative sense, the sometimes painful stretching of the frontiers of the imagination. The oedipal fantasy, for example, is not the actual desire to sleep with your mother or daughter but rather the fear that such a frightful thing might happen, and the obsessive, perfectly human urge to imagine what it would be like if it did. By the same token, the nightmares and terrible daydreams that devoted parents have of their children dying are not repressed wishes. They are toxic, compulsive experiments in examining the extent of their emotional dependence on the offspring they love.

 
; Suppose we take, for instance, the expression “Sodom and Gomorrah,” which has powerfully engaged religious fanatics through the ages. These are not places that most of them would like to be in, especially since they mainly associate by them with mass homosexual orgies. They simply mark the upper limit of what their limited imaginations can conceive of. The existence of these mythological sin-cities, far-fetched and fantastical as it may be, remains for them a seminal metaphor enabling them to live what they consider to be respectable and sinless lives. A more classic, perfectly formed fantasy than that of these ancient twin cities of sin would be hard to come by.

  The doorbell rang gaily, cutting short his train of thought. Ten forty: here she was. Andrew, going to open the door, was overcome all over again by Ann Lee’s unspoiled beauty. Wet from the rain, eyes sparkling, she smiled radiantly and threw her arms around him, dampening his clothes. Her cheek was smooth and cold, sprinkled with sugary drops of water. Her small feet must be frozen. “Some cocoa?” he asked. “Cocoa with a touch of rum? Maybe some wine?”

  She wriggled out of her raincoat by the door, leaving its stylish black puddle of rayon on the floor beneath her long, wet, black wool scarf. “Wine, thanks. Is there any red?” She was full of life: the concert must have gone well. As lithe as a ballerina, she sat on the rug, kicked off her shoes, and tossed them into a corner. Andrew, uncorking a bottle of wine, heard the sound from the kitchen. Next, she stripped off her black stockings, tossed them after the shoes, rose gracefully, and began to circle the room, drying her wet, cold feet on the thick rugs. Noticing the lit screen of the computer, she went over to it, scanned a few lines in silence, and read aloud in a pompous, professorial voice: “Rare is the man who has not dreamed at least once of having sex with his daughters. Sometimes this is transposed into an encounter with a strange, desirable woman that suddenly turns into a tabooed, incestuous act. Very interesting. Ve-ry interesting. You know you could be arrested for this, don’t you?”

  Andrew, returning from the kitchen with a large glass of wine in each hand, strode—not exactly hurrying, but with a slightly faster gait than usual—to his desk, handed Ann Lee her wine, and shut the lid of the computer, burying its lit screen in the keyboard. “Bad girl,” he said. “Weren’t you taught in school that it isn’t nice to read someone’s writing without permission?”

  Ann Lee threw him a sharp, amused look. “And being a dirty old man is nicer?” She embraced him, gave him a long kiss, and whispered in his ear: “Had any other interesting dreams you’ve forgotten to tell me about, Daddy?”

  13

  November 17, 2000

  The 19th of Heshvan, 5761

  The lamps on the living-room tables cast a warm, orange-tinted light on the floor, leaving the space beneath the ceiling in dusk. From the dining room came sounds of conversation and laughter. The guests were assembled there, waiting for Cora, Linda’s mother, to bring her renowned Thanksgiving turkey to the table. Someone rapped a fork on a wineglass to signal the start of the toasts. Putting her glass down, Linda snuggled up to Andrew on the couch in a way that took him twenty years back to the first days of their relationship. The sudden intimacy of it confused him, his emotion mixed with an unease that made his heart pound and his fingertips and facial muscles tingle. When had they last been together like this, so close to each other? And where was everybody? Suppose someone came and saw them?

  Linda gave him a long, significant look. Her hair, dyed red, fell in straight lines on both sides of her face, reframing it in a mysterious way. Andrew had to overcome the frightened instinct to back away and keep the correct distance they had maintained since the divorce.

  “I loved you, do you know that?” Linda paused, letting the full weight of her words resound in the charged quiet of the room. “I loved you very much. Sometimes I think I still do, even now.” She fixed her green eyes on him, their burning intensity not at all like her usual, self-incriminating smile. “Don’t get me wrong, Andy. It’s not that I have any regrets. But you’re still the best-looking man I’ve ever met.” She laid a gently provocative, cruelly sensual hand on his. Andrew recoiled as if bitten by a snake. Sharp and searing, her unexpected touch ran through him like an electric shock. He raised himself on his elbows, head jerked from the pillow. What the hell! The gray window sash stood out against the black wall. Where was he? The square numbers on the alarm clock glowed green in the dark: 4:24. He stared at them in disbelief, his mind unable to bridge the gap between sleep and wakefulness. Where was Linda? Where had everyone gone? The clock let out a small digital hiccup. The green numbers faded. Then their cold fire returned: 4:25 a.m.

  14

  November 23, 2000

  The 25th of Heshvan, 5761

  Autumn. The trees are bare and seem like they’ll never come to life again. How they take us by surprise each year anew. Thanksgiving is upon us. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is set to march on Thursday, but its huge floats are already lurking, like grotesque, brightly brindled prehistoric beasts, between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West. Once more we will stand in rows to see them go by; once more the sudden cold will find us unprepared, as if we had hoped this year would be different. The blue is gone from above; gray reigns over the palette. A pewter sky glowers in the leaden river, its sole ornament the brittle, slate-colored trees. The asphalt, a fresh black in spring, has aged and grayed, too; gray are the puffs of smoke rising from the town houses in which the first fireplaces have been lit. Their brownstone facades alone grow richer from day to day, as though the cold were distilling an utterly, unbearably beautiful essence from their bloodred veins.

  Kenny and Robin were the first to arrive. Sean, their eldest, was already—can you believe it?—twelve. Incredible how time flies! With Kenny’s brown eyes and wavy hair, he looked like a slimmer version of his father. Blond little Tessa, lissome and delicate, her blue eyes the color of distant oceans veiled by a dreamy mist, had Robin’s Nordic beauty. And let us not forget Barnabas, their old Labrador, limping in after them: he’s part of the family, too. Cora, as every year, remembered to tell about the Thanksgiving when Robin asked, “Kenny, have you seen the puppy?” A minute later, suspicious sounds came from the kitchen. What did we see? Little Barnabas, dragging behind him a turkey drumstick twice his size! “And what does Mom do?” asked Kenny, supplying the time-worn punch line. “Without losing a beat, she says to Barnabas, ‘Hey, just a second, you forgot the cranberry sauce!’”

  “Hi, Linda.” Robin kissed Linda. “Hi, George. I didn’t mean to overlook you. Is Andrew coming? It’s your big bourbon day, you must be impatient to see him. Hi, Mom, good to see you. Where should I put the cake? Sean, say hello to your grandma.”

  Eric arrived at four fifteen, accompanied by the same girlfriend he had come with the year before, who was as pretty and thin—perhaps a bit too thin—as a model. Linda, who couldn’t remember her name, kissed her warmly and avoided talking to her until Amy arrived and could be asked. Sean and Tessa joined Alison in the family room, sprawling out on the couches to watch TV while quietly devouring the appetizers on the coffee table. Barnabas plopped down beside them on the rug and fell asleep until the water bowl Robin had put there for him was mistakenly kicked over, its contents spilling on the parquet floor.

  Kim and Larry rang the doorbell at a quarter to five. Kim had to lean over a large bowl of fruit salad to kiss Linda. “We left really early, but there was terrible traffic. You wouldn’t believe it.” Larry brandished the bottle of expensive single malt scotch he had brought; he liked to impress people with exotic blends and rare vintages. “It’s time we put some style into this affair! What do you say to a twenty-one-year-old Glenlivet? They age it in sherry casks. We bought it in the duty-free in St. Thomas—you can’t find it in local liquor stores. Our local dealer has never even heard of it.”

  “Hi, Kimmy,” said Robin. “Hi, Larry. I wish you luck with the single malt, but I’ll probably be your only customer. Kenny’s waiting for Andrew to start their annual bourbon binge
.”

  George thanked Larry, took the bottle, and placed it on the bar beside the snacks, ice bucket, and bottles of wine, whiskey, soda, and juices. At five, Rachel walked in with Tom. “Hi, sweetheart,” Linda murmured to her, giving her a big hug. She hugged Tom, too, standing on tiptoe to give him a kiss. At home in her house, he shook the hands of the men standing by the bar and accepted a generous glass of scotch from Larry. Rachel went to the kitchen with Linda to say hello to Grandma Cora and get the lowdown from Aunt Amy, who had just walked in, on Eric and his girlfriend. “They met at Amherst. She’s lovely. She’s majoring in music. No, I don’t like her weight, either. I wouldn’t call it an eating disorder, but she’s super-skinny. It’s nothing I can talk about to Eric, though. You know what he’s like . . .”

  “Hi, George.” Rachel hugged George, who had come to fill the basket of blue corn chips and the bowl of salsa. Yes, there was some tension between them during the first years of his marriage to Linda but what would you have expected? It was long gone now and she was genuinely fond of him.