by Julia Glass
Ray speeds up, taking us so far from the shore that we can hardly see it anymore. At last, he slows down and gives me a look. Here? I nod. It takes me a moment to venture standing, but soon I am used to the motion of the deck. I turn on my boom box. The tape that plays is Uprising, a favorite of Clem’s. She loved Bob Marley. I read a passage from Thoreau about the solace of nature when other people simply become unbearable. Together, Mom and I take the plastic bag from the box and undo the twist tie that holds it closed. We are about to reach into the bag and take hold of Clem by the handful, to fling her astern, but something stops us. Instead, we take the bag and, kneeling down, leaning as far over as we can, we empty it in one declarative motion. Most of the cinders fall, though others blow free. Clem, or the matter that was Clem, plummets like a gray cloud down into the depths, out of sight. The weight of the ashes takes me by surprise; only a vague, indecisively shaped film remains on the surface. Ashes, I realize, do not dissolve. Clem was right: she will be dispersed but never contained.
I reach into the satchel I brought along, unfurl the Doris Day wig, and fling that into the water as well. It floats. “What in tarnation is that?” asks Mom. She knows perfectly well what it is; she just wants to know what it’s doing here. It’s my turn to give her a look she hasn’t seen since I was a teenager. I tap Ray’s shoulder and he starts back to shore. When we arrive at the dock, Bob Marley’s still playing. As Dad steps off to secure the lines, he says tersely, “You can turn that fellow off now.”
That’s when it occurs to me that Bob Marley died young, too—from cancer, skin cancer invading the brain. Which makes me think of Eva Hesse. Which brings me back to myself, my fear. Bob, Eva, me.
“Everything’s an omen, I can’t stand it,” I whisper to Ray. I explain the connections. We are following my parents, at a careful distance, through the boatyard toward the parking lot.
Ray stops. “Superstition’s the easy way out.”
“Out of what?”
“You can’t help secretly thinking, even hoping, that she took your place.” He laughs, just barely. “Well, she did no such thing. Not when she was born. Not now.”
My mother is already in the car, at the wheel. She’ll want a martini as soon as we get to the restaurant. Who wouldn’t? My father stands guard at her open door, waiting for me and Ray to catch up. As we get closer, I see that she’s holding his hand. They make a picture of lives that flow together and apart, together and apart. I see their marriage as something like a double helix, two souls coiling round a common axis, joined yet never touching. Our lives, Clem’s and mine, made that shape too, for a time.
The Last Word
2005
I take out plates and glasses for two before I remember Henri, who will certainly want to join us. As I place his cushion on a chair, I realize that I’m glad he’s here, that I’m wondering if it was foolish to invite this man for lunch—not because I’ll feel unsafe with him but because I’m not sure, after all, that I want to talk about the things I’m certain we’ll talk about.
Henri is my godson. He’s six, but he thrives in the company of grown-ups. He can sit for hours in a restaurant, engaged by the chitchat and gaiety of adults as they drink wine and soak up the pleasure of sitting together while others do the work to keep them sated and happy. He interrupts now and then with whimsical, irrelevant remarks, but he never crawls under the table or complains that it’s time to leave. Already, perhaps because he’s such an urban kid, he knows that blunt or wicked observations about nearby strangers—their silly garments, rude habits, unflattering hairstyles—are to be delivered in a whisper, behind a cupped hand, straight into a grown-up’s ear. He’s the sort of child whom the maître d’ will praise as you leave. “What remarkable manners!” “That’s quite a son you have there.” (And if they choose to believe he’s mine, my son, I never correct them; neither does he.) He earns off-menu treats from the chef, even gifts. Two weeks ago, Henri’s father brought him along to a working lunch, a staged conversation with a Times art critic at a fancy Chinese restaurant where all four of us dipped our fingers in bowls of water flecked with petals, where the table glowed in a pink spotlight, where the plates were translucent as dragonfly wings. Henri watched and mimicked the adults’ meticulous, self-conscious manners, listened to his father and the critic as if they were telling folktales under the spell of night. As we were leaving, the owner presented Henri with a ceramic tiger. It was a small well-crafted object to which he had pointed, with longing and awe, when we passed a display of Chinese knickknacks on our way in. “Very special boy,” the owner said, bowing and grinning. Henri bowed right back and told him that the noodles had been very special, too.
Henri’s father, Esteban, is an artist who achieved success when he was old enough, and had struggled long enough, to know how rare, even miraculous, it is to succeed in his field. He believes that he owes this success to me, because I praised his work when I was an editor at an art magazine that can, it’s true, mold or shatter reputations and careers. In his eyes, I am the fairy godmother who lifted her wand and changed him from a cabdriver into a coveted guest at collectors’ parties, into someone who pays a New York City mortgage, whose children go to a liberal downtown private school. But we genuinely like each other, without having to consider such a debt, and twelve years of hard work since then have made any sense of obligation moot. And then there’s Henri. I adore Henri.
He is staying with me for a week while his parents and his older brother are in Haiti, to arrange his grandmother’s funeral. Unlike his brother, Henri did not know his grandmother well, so Esteban thought it better, and safer, to leave him with me and my husband. Campbell adores Henri, too—with a nostalgia that reveals how much he’s loved being a father from the very moment he became one—and Campbell’s two sons enjoy the presence of a much smaller boy. Luke and Max are close in age to Henri’s brother, but unlike his brother, they treat him only with affection and generosity. They pull out their old toys; they read him stories; and if they go out with friends, to buy pizza or shoot hoops, they take Henri along, as if to show him off. In return, Henri esteems and validates their adolescent swagger. When he stays with us, the rules relax. Games of soccer are played in the hallway, sneakers abandoned beneath the table, rock ‘n’ roll songs composed at top volume on Luke’s electronic keyboard. Boy Heaven, Campbell calls our place when Henri comes to stay.
Right now, Henri is at the far end of the loft, building a zoo with Lego blocks and faded plastic animals that Luke and Max outgrew long ago but refuse to surrender.
“Hey you,” I call out, “come help me set the table for our guest!”
He leaps to his feet. “What’s my job! What’s my job! What’s my job!” he chants as he runs toward the kitchen.
“First, napkins,” I say. I fold them and hand them to him one at a time. “Forks,” I say. “Knives.” They are butter knives, perfectly safe, even if he fumbles and drops them. “Spoons.”
He holds the last spoon close to his face. “Handsome nose,” he says to his reflection.
“You are so right,” I say. When I put him to bed last night, I told him he has a handsome nose. The nose comes straight from his father.
“Will he bring animals with him?” Henri asks.
“No,” I say. “The animals have to stay where they live—in the forest or at the zoo.”
“But he’s their friend, right?”
“He finds out things about the animals—the birds—that help people save them out in the wild.”
“Because they’re endangered,” Henri says, frowning. “Because of global warming.” Henri’s kindergarten teacher has been talking to the class about global warming. When I picked him up yesterday, he was carrying a collage he’d made. At the center is a photograph of a polar bear on a perilously tiny ice floe; he looks like a woman in a dress that’s clearly too small. Anthropomorphize yet further and you’d say he (or she) looks perplexed and sad. Around the bear Henri glued sunsets, whales, and seals, but also
a freeway traffic jam, a vast landfill, and a daunting image of factory smokestacks somewhere in China. Along with the collage came a class handout titled Let’s All Do Our Part! Henri goes around the loft turning out lights after people. Every few hours, he checks the recycling bins, to make sure we are separating refuse as the city requires (regulations his teacher has posted on the classroom wall). Until I gently asked him not to, he’d stand outside the bathroom when anyone was using it, and he’d announce, “You don’t have to flush every time!”
“Sometimes that’s why,” I say now. “Or sometimes it’s because of pollution in the water, or because people want to build houses where the birds need to live. Which scares the birds away, and then they have a hard time finding another good home.”
“So it’s always people’s fault.” He looks at me earnestly.
“Well, mostly,” I say, though I’m not comfortable issuing this condemnation. Should a six-year-old already see humanity as heedless, destructive, and selfish? “But then there are other people who have the job of trying to help the birds. And other animals, too.”
“Like the polar bear.”
“Yes.” And I notice yet again how the current woes of the world, or the woes on which reporters and kindergarten teachers have seized with such alacrity—though this is good, we tell ourselves as we thank poor, dear, wronged Al Gore for his crusading—how they hold my sister close to my conscience as well as my memory. It’s painful yet remotely amusing. Or Clem would have found it amusing: that her beloved grizzlies—unlike their polar cousins—are staging a comeback, while she is the one who’s gone, leaving no descendants. Sometimes I’m haunted by the thought that the work she did twelve years ago wouldn’t seem so quixotic, so lonely, today. Would this have made a difference to her?
I place the salad on the counter and cover it with a damp towel. I cut a long loaf of bread across the middle, brush the halves with oil, rub them with garlic, close the loaf, and wrap it in foil. I make sure there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge. I don’t drink wine at lunch, but today may be an exception.
“Can Darius sit with us?” Henri asks.
“Good idea,” I say.
Henri runs to my bedroom—indoors or out, running is his baseline speed—and returns with Darius, a stuffed polar bear whose fake white fur has yellowed over the years, though his glass eyes and velvet nose are still intact. I think of Henri’s collage and wonder if it’s a coincidence; but then polar bears, like Al Gore, are suddenly all the alarmist rage.
Henri pulls a fourth chair next to his own. He props Darius there—even though the creature’s head is well below the tabletop. Henri tells me that Darius won’t need a fork or a plate, that he won’t eat salad or bread—not even pretend. “Only meat. Seals and fish.”
Our guest is a vegetarian, so there will be nothing agreeable to polar bears.
The buzzer startles us both. I speak through the intercom and let Ralph into the building. Henri waits by the door; I unlock it so that he can open it by himself. I hear the elevator descending. Henri runs back to the kitchen, grabs Darius, and returns to his post. I hang back a little, pretending to rearrange the tulips. I put the bread in the oven.
And then I hear Henri introducing Darius to Ralph. Ralph shakes hands with both of them, making the proper fuss over finding a polar bear as a fellow lunch guest in a Lower Manhattan loft.
When it’s my turn to greet Ralph—awkwardly, we embrace—I’m still struggling to reconcile his present incarnation with my memory of the man I met, twenty-five years ago, on a visit with Clem the summer she lived in Vermont. He’s still youthful and fit, but the sun has roughened his skin, and his hair, cropped fashionably close, is pure gray. Until our conversation on the subway last week, when I recognized him in the strangest of ways, I hadn’t seen or even heard about him since that summer.
“This is a treat,” he says, setting a backpack on the bench by the door. “Most of my meals while I’m here are Chinese takeout or deli salad bar.”
“Well, I can’t promise much better than the latter,” I say.
“We’re not eating a ladder!” exclaims Henri.
“Wiseguy,” I say.
Like every guest who enters the loft, Ralph is drawn to the large window in the living room. The view isn’t grand or panoramic, but it’s very New York: we’re just a floor or two above most adjacent rooftops, so we look out on makeshift sky gardens, sunbathers, and air-conditioning turbines. Campbell and his sons call it the “twenty-seven-water-tower view.” If you challenge them, they’ll count you through it. Sometimes I demand this performance, just for the amusement. They’ve turned it into a family act, a cross between hip-hop and vaudeville.
“Toto,” says Ralph, “I don’t think we’re in the rain forest anymore.” He turns and smiles at me, so warmly that my anxiety dissolves. Here is the man I remember, the friend (and boss) of my sister who radiated kindness as well as confidence, on whom I had a crush for one brief night of dancing to Marvin Gaye on a Burlington jukebox; who, the next day, witnessed what remains my most humiliating moment, the time I nearly drowned at that swimming hole and Clem saved my life before an audience of strangers. Later she insisted I wouldn’t have drowned, that what she did—talk me out of a panic—was no big deal. I pointed out that if my situation really hadn’t been so dire, I’d be doubly mortified. “Okay, so definitely I saved your life,” Clem said, “which means you owe me one.” Over the next decade, whenever we came together, she enjoyed ribbing me in front of our friends. With a glint in her eye, she’d make offhand remarks like “Wasn’t that the same summer I saved your life?” She even referred to it in a toast at my first wedding—telling Hugh that by extension he owed her bigtime. I might have minded, and told her so, but I enjoyed her attention, which I saw as proof of a deep bond between us, never mind that we saw so little of each other, that our lives had grown so differently and distantly busy that we wrote and called less and less often.
Recently, when I tried to conjure the scene of that wedding dinner, of Clem’s toast, I realized that I am losing the sound of her voice, that I’ve already lost the memory of her laugh. It’s both comforting and painfully confusing to remember this: that my sister loved to laugh.
Ralph accepts a beer. He sits in a chair facing the view. I sit across from him, with a glass of water. If I have wine now, I’ll lose control of my logic—and my emotions.
Henri sits beside me, Darius on his lap. I see Ralph appraising us as a pair. This would be an immediate puzzle, since I am pale and Henri’s dark. “Henri is my godson,” I say. “My favorite godson.” I hug him to my side.
Ralph is now looking around at what he can see of the loft, at the objects that overshadow the simple furniture. At the far end, above Henri’s Lego zoo, hang Campbell’s antique Mardi Gras masks, a collection from his days at Tulane, but most of the walls are taken up by the artwork I own, much of it given to me by the artists I love best. “Wow,” says Ralph, and I realize that our hasty, hurtling conversation on the A train, only five stops long, did not fill him in on very much of my life. I wonder if he remembers anything about the life I was living when I met him in Vermont. It occurs to me that in fact he may not have remembered me, even when I introduced myself on the train. But of course he remembers Clem. Who wouldn’t?
“Henri’s father,” I say, “is one of the artists I represent at my gallery—at the gallery I share with my partners.” I look up, to point out the piece that dominates the loft once you see it. A great web of fine white feathers, knit ingeniously, invisibly together, droops delicately from above, as if the ceiling has become the underbelly of a mammoth gull or egret. I blush, thinking of Ralph’s work with birds.
“Wow,” Ralph says again. “Now that is something.”
“That’s my dad’s,” Henri brags.
“Wow. Your dad has quite the imagination.”
“I think the feathers came from a place that supplies pillow makers,” I offer, and then feel even more embarrassed.
“You’re not offending me here,” says Ralph. “I’m not an animal-rights extremist. Please.” He stands and begins to look at other pieces of art arranged in the room around us. He asks about a photograph and a sculpture. Certain that he’s only being polite, I keep my answers short. “Now here we have something downright avant-garde,” he says, pointing to a pair of hockey sticks leaning against the doorway to the boys’ bedroom.
“My stepsons. Luke and Max.”
“I get to stay in their room, but I don’t live here,” says Henri. “I live in Long Island City. I have my own bedroom when I’m at home. I have a bed and a hammock. Sometimes I sleep in my hammock.”
“I sometimes sleep in a hammock, too,” says Ralph. “Outside, even.”
Henri nods. “You live in the jungle.”
I smile at him, wondering if Ralph and I will be able to have a continuous conversation—or if, secretly, I hope we won’t. What was I thinking, inviting him over? And what could the poor guy do but say yes? I’m sure it’s clear to both of us that what I want is for him to shed more light on Clem’s life—and, by implication, her death. He did know about it; by the second subway stop we passed, he’d told me how sorry he was; what a waste, what a loss, how awful for our parents.
Henri informs Ralph, with obvious pride, that Luke is fifteen and Max is twelve. Max was born the same year Clem died.
“You’ll probably get to meet them for about three minutes,” I say, “when they come roaring through to drop off their soccer equipment. You won’t meet my husband, though. I’m afraid he’s spending the weekend at one of those ghastly corporate golf things. He hates them—he hates golf—but it’s part of his job.”
“Is he in the art world, too?”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “For which I’m grateful. He handles real estate investments at NYU.”
“Ah!” says Ralph, as if this is a compelling job to someone who spends his life trying to figure out how we can undo the damage we’ve done to all the wild creatures around us—much of that damage involving real estate. On the A train, he told me he comes to New York a few times a year; he has an office at the Wildlife Conservation Society (the zoo, to those of us who take children up to the Bronx to see giraffes, gorillas, and all the fierce, coldhearted predators that we may be delighted not to number among the ever-increasing threats we face as city dwellers who are just too stubborn to flee).