Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  And what made the whole thing hard on her was the fact that in spite of everything, and indeed sometimes because of what he was going through, and what his response to it was, she really liked him. He was a decent guy. One of the things you learn as an athlete is the kind of self-discipline that allows you to practice what you preach. And Paul had become extremely good at doing what he said he was going to do. If he said he was available to Skype with Cal at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, Dana knew perfectly well that the little buzz-ring of her computer, one of those manufactured happy sounds that genuinely did the trick, produced the emotion it was meant to suggest, would buzz and ring at three o’clock on the dot. When they bought the apartment, they set up a joint account for mortgage payments. Paul almost never used it these days, but it was always full—he clearly kept an eye on it, and topped it off months before she might have wanted to ask him to. He never mentioned this either, and so they never needed to have a conversation about money, or the larger conversation that the money conversation would have included. This was just something he did. If he said he could take Cal for three weeks in August, he would fly to New York on the agreed day to pick him up and then either stay a few nights in the city with Dana, to acclimatize Cal to the changeover, or take him back to Austin on the afternoon flight, whatever it was they had decided beforehand.

  Plus, on some level she genuinely believed everything he was saying, about competition and striving and the pointlessness of it all. Paul had had the same reaction to his competitive athletic ability that she had had years before to her own physical attractiveness—that it was superficial and occasionally useful maybe, but also something you have to learn to put up with, and which can easily become a distraction from things that matter. After a while you realize that every time you enter into an intellectual conversation with some guy at a party, or even with one of your friends of long standing who should have known better, just the fact of your prettiness seems to them to be making promises that you have no intention of keeping. Every time you confess a feeling or make a joke, you give off these promises. And there’s nothing they can do about it, there’s nothing you can say to them or explain in advance, because whatever you say or explain they just keep hearing more promises. So on some level you realize that whoever you actually are, whatever it is that you are actually like, is so tied up in the complicated but ultimately predictable way that other people react to you (women, too, whose expectations based on your looks are usually different from but not always deeper than the expectations of men), that you genuinely can’t tell anymore if you’re funny or interesting or honest.

  Moving to Wimberley, or to a house outside Wimberley on the Blanco River, seemed to Dana like an extreme reaction to this problem, or whatever version of this problem Paul was responding to, but it also seemed to her like an understandable reaction. She just didn’t want to move to Wimberley.

  Which meant that when she did start seeing somebody in New York, she was more shocked and upset by the sudden realization of what was ending, or what she was giving up, than she had expected. The depths of this realization, the emotional frame of mind it put her in, the vulnerability it exposed, gave off more of those promises to the guy in question (like a scent or a body odor, intimately connected with you, but which you also have only limited control over), so that everything in both directions (retreating from one lover and advancing toward another) happened faster than she could internalize or digest. She had reached, in ordinary daily life—the decisions you make, the places you go, the people you see—the kind of hyper-speed unpredictable reality of accident scenes, in which instincts you were only dimly aware of suddenly emerge and become visible, act in the powerful ways they are capable of acting, before submerging again and leaving you to cope with or come to terms with their appearance.

  The guy in question was a TV producer. He was older, he had been divorced twice, some of his shows were pretty successful, though most of that was in the past; and in fact he seemed much less sure of himself, more touching and awkward, than any of the obvious ways of describing him would suggest. Which didn’t prevent him from being fairly persistent in his pursuit. They met through friends—his daughter worked with one of the photographers Dana also sometimes worked for. Stephen had a big apartment on Third Avenue, a nice place, though in other respects he seemed to Dana fairly hard up, in an attractive way. He had inexpensive tastes in restaurants, this was his own phrase for it. Most of his money was what he called “old money, from the 1990s”—his current income fluctuated between modest and nonexistent. But he also didn’t seem to care that much about any of this stuff. In that way, he resembled Paul. He had made some decent television programs he was still proud of, he had worked on a couple of turkeys, too; in any case, that side of his life was probably behind him, a fact that he had painfully come to terms with. But he was still ambitious in other respects. After you’ve been through two marriages and two divorces, after you’ve raised two kids, at the age of fifty-three you realize, you have a limited time left, you’ve got limited vitality, to do the stuff you want to do with your life. This was all part of his pickup routine, part of his sales pitch, which he was self-aware enough to flag up even while he was making it.

  They still hadn’t slept together. In that respect, it was all much more innocent than she could have imagined. They made out once, in the back of a cab; but she broke it off, a fact about which he was surprisingly understanding.

  “Look,” he said, “I get it, I’ve been through these things, through the ups and downs. It’s also true that I can probably control myself now a little better than when I was twenty years old.”

  “I need to make a few things clearer, in my own head,” she started to say. “Not just in your head, sweetheart,” he told her. “These things aren’t just in your head. What you want is a note from teacher. That it’s okay. But nobody’s teacher anymore.”

  For some reason, it didn’t annoy her to be talked to this way. But he was also very tender toward her, very solicitous. And somehow the innocence heightened the intensity of feeling. What it felt like was kindness, a kind of generosity, very simple, which she hadn’t been able to show toward Paul in a long time; and she got the sense, from his side, that something similar was going on. They listened carefully to each other, they explained themselves carefully. The way you do when you’re young. She also realized that before anything else happened, she needed to talk to Paul, she probably needed to see him; and she wanted to talk to Liesel, too.

  * * *

  The houses around Wheeler Street have big front yards. People work hard on them, and even in winter there are red pyracantha bushes, pansies in the grass, bright ornamental cabbages, pots of geraniums on the stoop, and lots of Christmas lights. A park at the bottom of the road has a creek running through it, overgrown with weeds and bedded down between limestone walls. Not so much a park as a grassy field. Since she first got together with Paul, Dana had come to Austin a half-dozen times, and she felt a faint sting of homecoming as Bill turned the Volvo up the familiar curved street that led to their house.

  What surprised her, and upset her more, is the way Cal ran out of the car as soon as they got there. “Is it the swing house?” he said, and she realized (which she knew perfectly well) that he had come more recently than she had—that he spent time there with Paul.

  Liesel, lifting her bad leg out of the car, explained: “We had Mario put up a swing on the front porch.”

  Cal had already run down the side alley, past Liesel’s study, into the backyard. It was nice to see him running after being cooped up on the plane all morning, staring at a screen; but it hurt a little, too. One of those premature ways that divorce or separation forces you to accept that the kids have their own lives. Bill started dragging her suitcase out of the trunk, and Dana took over.

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  “It wheels,” she told him; and he let her pull it up the driveway to the front door.

  When they got insid
e, Liesel led the way upstairs. “I’ve put you in the wooden room,” she said—a token of intimacy, which Dana heard and understood. It meant she knew the family jargon.

  “I don’t know what he sleeps in at home,” Liesel went on, a little breathlessly. At the far end of the landing, she opened a door. “But when Cal’s here he likes to sleep in the crib. Paul had it until he was four. He refused to sleep in a bed and in the end, it didn’t matter—he could climb in and out perfectly easily. It didn’t seem worth fighting about.” She looked at Dana; her eyes were bright. Whatever awkwardness she might have felt had been translated somehow into something more sentimental. “Well,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it. I’m making coffee if you want some. Jean should be back soon, she said she was bringing lunch. I’ll go see what Cal is doing. He’s fine out there, he doesn’t do anything dangerous.”

  Dana sat on the freshly made bed when Liesel was gone. She looked at the shelves, which were full of old books, a showpiece collection of leather-bound Walter Scott novels (not in very good condition), but also kids’ books, the Hardy Boys series, Nancy Drew. Whatever nobody wanted ended up here. And in front of the books, on shelf after shelf, she saw trophies. Mostly the cheap kind, with painted marble bases and plastic golden figures screwed into the top. For second place in the AISD Geometry Competition, 1985, Nathan Essinger. Also, some of Paul’s tennis trophies, the early ones. Bill was a serial buyer of cheap antiques, Schnäppchen he called them: willow-pattern plates, Kilim rugs, barometers and oil-paintings and prints. The room was full of those, too. It looked like a junk shop, but in a pleasant way. On top of a rocking chair, gathering dust, lay three volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia 1978. That kind of thing. Just the stuff you pick up along the way, in a long life, which has many children in it. Dana felt weirdly emotional. The story in her head, the confession or explanation she wanted to make to Liesel, had shifted again, and it was tiring, constantly, on some level of consciousness, to keep rewriting it.

  *

  Jean turned out to have strong opinions about Christmas trees. Dana had been looking forward to seeing her. Of all the Essinger kids, not including Paul, Jean was the one she felt she had most in common with. When they were in Austin together, which didn’t happen often, they liked to duck out the backyard gate and walk to Trudy’s for a margarita and sometimes even a quick cigarette. But what Dana felt when she saw Jean again was a strange kind of disappointment, which she found it hard afterward to put her finger on. (Her boyish friendly face, under the short hair, looked like Paul’s; she dressed like a boy, too, in Levi’s and a T-shirt, and gave Dana a fraternal hug.) Maybe what had weakened or disappeared was the sense she sometimes had in Jean’s company that they were conspiring together about something. Or against something—the other Essingers. Or gossiping about them. But that door seemed to be shut.

  But it was fine anyway, it was nice seeing her. It was totally fine. Jean brought in a bunch of random tacos from Changos, a Styrofoam box of nachos, a couple of soups, and a cheese-and-bean quesadilla for Cal. Apparently, this is what he liked—this is what Paul said he always ate at Changos. Another one of those little facts that, as his mother, you have to digest, you have to come to terms with. Bill said he wasn’t eating, there was a meaningless football game on TV in the room next door, but then he came in and ate anyway. He finished up.

  Jean looked well. Dana told her so. Not necessarily skinnier than usual … though she was always emerging from or entering into some diet or other, which she tried out not from any great conviction or desire to lose weight, but partly because her friends in London were all on these fashionable diets and there was nothing you could do except join in—if you wanted to cook for them or eat out with them. But the part of it she liked, the part she enjoyed, was coming up with edible possibilities out of the ridiculous sets of constraints, whatever they were. Only green vegetables and fats. Or no fats at all but only complex carbohydrates. It was like a challenge. It was like writing a sonnet, where for no particular reason you have to limit yourself to rhyming words every other line. Anyway, when she came back to Austin, she just wanted to eat. Not that Austinites weren’t just as faddy about this kind of thing as everybody else. Probably more so.

  All of this banter seemed like a way of putting something off, other kinds of conversation, whatever else it might seem obvious for them to talk about. But she did it very naturally, very confidently—Dana couldn’t really be sure if Jean was holding back on her or not. Then they went out Christmas-tree shopping together. Cal came, too, which took a certain amount of persuasion. He kept asking, where are the kids, when are the kids coming. Late tonight, Dana told him. When you wake up tomorrow morning they’ll all be there. Or some of them will. Which kids, he asked. That big one, that big boy? He meant Susie’s son Ben. Yes, Ben will be there. They’re flying in late tonight. With a baby. Little baby May. You won’t be the baby of the family anymore. I’m not a baby … Most of these reactions are predictable, but you walk into them anyway. They got him in the car with a square of peanut brittle Jean had been saving for some occasion like this. He didn’t actually like it, he made his what-weird-thing-have-you-put-in-my-mouth face, but it got him in the seat.

  First they drove to the lot on San Gabriel, five minutes around the corner, where the Austin Optimist Club raised money every year by selling trees. This was kind of a family tradition, but it was also a kind of family tradition to show up too late when all the good trees had gone and spend about half an hour kicking around the pine-needley yellow grass and making jokes about the shitty trees. Holding one up and saying, how about this one, while Liesel looked on semi-despairing and starting to worry that this year we really won’t get a decent tree. Cal had a pretty good time. Part of what became clear—Dana knew this already but said that every year she forgot—is that the Essingers just had a different taste in trees than she did, different standards. What Dana liked is the kind of Fraser fir you saw in the window of Madison Avenue shops, covered in tinsel or fake snow, all fluffy and bushy. Whereas the Essingers used real candles and needed something sparser.

  “Every year we have this argument,” Dana said, to be a sport about it. But then realized that just saying this, in the way she said it, was making claims, about her rights in the family and what had happened in the past and was going to happen in the future, that she wasn’t in a position to make anymore.

  But Jean, who was sensitive to this kind of awkwardness, and good-hearted, said in response what she would have said anyway, that Dana had no taste, or she had the kind of glitzy, expensive but basically low-brow American taste that you get from growing up in a city like New York. In fact, she went on, because she was also sensitive to the possibility that just by teasing Dana the way she always teased her, by being friendly, you could also go too far. “What’s really happening here is that I’m channeling Susie, who will judge us for what we come home with today. And I don’t want to be judged. I like Frasers, too. They’re like the Christmas tree that Charlie Brown would want, except he always ends up with that scrawny kind where the branches are too weak to hold up the decorations.”

  It was tiring, for everyone, paying attention to all these claims you couldn’t help making, and the possible misinterpretations. After San Gabriel, they drove out along North Lamar to the big Whole Foods between Fifth and Sixth. But they were sold out, too. So they doubled back and tried the Christmas tree farm at Papa Noels on Mopac, which wasn’t any better. By this point Liesel was getting genuinely upset, Cal was tired and hungry, and there was a running argument, where Jean kept taking the high ground, about whether or not they should put up with something obviously substandard or keep going. “I don’t mind doing this myself,” Jean said. “If Cal is tired.”

  “Cal’s going to be tired anyway. He can fall asleep in the car if he wants to,” Dana said. And in spite of everything, all the new subtlety and complex etiquette involved, what was happening was real and ordinary and annoying, and fine, in the way it would have been anywa
y; and Dana felt, whether she was imagining it or not, that Jean was softening toward her, or opening up. Or not even that, but that whatever relationship they had always had in spite of or independent from Paul was surfacing again.

  There’s a Home Depot on Mopac, too, out past Papa Noels. By the time they got there, it was a little after five o’clock, the sudden subtropical winter dark was in the process of falling, where you go from a mild sunny winter day to actual streetlamp-lit night in the space of about twenty minutes. In the parking lot, which was half-empty, but filled with or seemingly surrounded by the highway noise, they found a wide green tent fenced off with metal barriers. But there were still a few trees left inside it, decent trees but too big, which nobody wanted. Cal snuck under the barrier—Dana climbed over. Liesel stood outside, worrying and feeling cold. That faintly dementia-flavored but basically also existentially accurate feeling you get in the dusk, near highways, had descended on everyone—like, What am I doing here? Where am I? I need to get somewhere quickly where the artificiality and frailty of all this human-settlement stuff isn’t so obvious. There were electrically powered cutting tools lying in the tent, which probably explained the barriers. Jean went inside to find a guy. Eventually—it was dark by this point, proper dark—Jean and the guy came out and they bought a tree. He cut it down for them, pruning the lower branches, too, so it could fit in the stand, in the light of a Klieg lamp, or whatever they’re called, which was lying on the ground in a tangle of wires. It was cold enough that the heat the lamp generated misted in the beams of the light it generated. They pulled the tree into the trunk of the Volvo, half of the backseat had to be folded down, and Dana got into the other half and put Cal on her lap. They drove home.