Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  At his three-month checkup, when the doctors gave him the all-clear, they went for a drink afterward at the Russell Hotel. He asked Jean to marry him, when the divorce came through, and she joked: “I think you’re feeling emotional now because you’ve had good news.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want to?”

  The tone of the conversation had suddenly changed—it was like a change in temperature. “I want to, but you haven’t even met my parents.”

  “You think they will change my mind?” Then, smiling: “You think they will change your mind?”

  And she said, “I want you to meet them.”

  There were traffic cops working the access road to the terminal, and she joined the line of cars and taxis and tried to keep an eye out on the side of the road, for somewhere to pull in. But you could only pull in if your passengers had arrived. What a day. At six she was dropping Bill off at Austin-Bergstrom, and now she was here, sixteen hours later and two hundred miles away. What Bill would call a two-airport day. Henrik was almost certainly asleep—it was four o’clock in the morning Greenwich Mean Time, and she still had at least another three hours to drive. All these people looking for cabs and rides, college students, flying home for Christmas; young parents, crying kids. But the cops wouldn’t let you linger, they kept waving everybody along. Then you went through the whole business again, pulled out of the line and onto the freeway, heading out again, into the night, into the wide country, before you doubled back. But on her second time around she saw them: Nathan, in his travel suit, by the side of the road, handsome and fidgety, after sitting on flights, waiting in airports—he was walking up and down, a big restless well-dressed man. His hair was even wilder than usual, he looked tired. Clémence and Julie leaned against each other on a bench; Margot lay on a couple of suitcases pushed together, fast asleep.

  “Hey,” Jean said, pulling over, lowering her window. “You made it.”

  *

  Nathan had gone back into the terminal, searching for something to eat (which is why Jean missed them on her first circuit). Julie was hungry, but all he found was vending-machine food, Ritz peanut butter crackers, Fritos, bottled water, and he battled with the intake slot to accept a five-dollar bill, then kept pulling out the change to pay for the rest. Margot had fallen asleep on that second flight—he had to carry her from the airplane. She was heavy enough these days that he still felt the pressure of her weight on the crook of his arm; he was conscious also of a light sweat against the collar of his shirt. Anyway, he felt hungry, too, and when Julie turned down the crackers, he said, okay, and started eating them, pacing, he didn’t like to wait and he had to suspend whatever he felt about the fact that Jean was late.

  When she came, she got out of the Volvo to help, and he said to her, “Why don’t you let me drive?” Julie climbed in the back, and Clémence sat in the middle, so Margot could lie with her head on her mother’s lap. But the girl woke up when Nathan lifted her. She wanted to walk (“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said, “I can walk,” with the patient enduring sweetness of a kid in transit late at night), and he picked up the suitcases instead and put them in the trunk. His briefcase, which had his computer in it, among other things, he gave to Jean—she wasn’t sure why, but she took it off his hands.

  “I thought you don’t like driving at night,” she said.

  “I’ll be all right if you keep talking. At least for the first shift. You’ve been on the road for the last three hours.” And she let him—he was her big brother, and she sat in front with his briefcase on her lap until she thought, this is silly, and put it between her feet.

  But she had to guide him out. The road to Austin was far from straightforward and for the first twenty minutes all they talked about was what lane to be in and when to come off. They joined the traffic into downtown Fort Worth before following signs for Waco, but the exit was a left exit, and Nathan had to cut across two lanes in order to merge. After that, it was relatively plain sailing, they could talk. Jean said to Clémence, turning her head to get her voice across (the Volvo was an old car, with poor sound insulation, and you could hear the road noise coming through in constant vibrations, through the windows and the soles of your shoes): “Do you hate me for making you come? I feel like I bullied you into it, you must have been cursing my name all day.”

  “Not at all,” Clémence said.

  She had a kind of European charm or social ease that was hard to figure out. Her mother was Canadian, and she grew up in Montreal, but had also lived in London for several years. With her hair tied back, undyed, streaked equally with black and white, her elegant neck, and her face, pointed and dark and pretty, but also showing her age … she was one of those successful women for whom this is also a show of power. I don’t have to care anymore.

  Jean once complained to Susie that Clémence had a way of treating her like a kid sister, and Susie said, “Well, she’s Nathan’s wife,” as if that explained it. But in fact, Nathan was eight years younger; when they met, most of the status and influence were on her side (though he’d been catching up). She started as a print journalist before making the jump into radio and then TV. Both of which require a certain manner. In private life, too, she often came prepared with topics of conversation—even late at night, with tired kids, on a long drive from the airport. But maybe this was just a form of shyness, or what used to be shyness; she needed a script.

  Anyway, what Clémence wanted to talk about now was the Christmas lights on 37th Street. One of her gigs was presenting features for This American Life. “My producer suggested I check them out. Since I’m going anyway.” Maybe this sounded more critical or half-hearted than she meant it to, because she leaned forward to compensate, into the gap between the front seats. “What I mean is, I’m happy to be here.”

  She had to shout a little, over the noise of the car.

  “I haven’t been to see them yet,” Jean said. “I only got in yesterday.”

  About a year before she had asked Clémence to present one of Henrik’s programs, on Tunisia after the revolution. (Her father was Egyptian and she still kept in touch with relatives in Cairo—she spoke reasonable Arabic, along with fluent French). It should have been simple enough, either she wanted to or not, but somehow it turned into a favor Jean was asking and which Clémence felt some pressure to accept. So that when the dates didn’t work out, which was really from Jean’s point of view completely fine, there was still an aftertaste of embarrassment or apology.

  “It’s not really the lights,” Clémence went on. “They’ve been looking for an angle on Austin. A surprising number of people I know want to move here.”

  “I get the same thing in London,” Jean said. “People ask me, where are you from, so I say Austin, and they say, oh, that’s like the acceptable or cool part of Texas, right? I’ve heard such great things … and so on. And part of me wants to say, you know, it’s just … even when we were kids, it’s just a nice American campus town. At least it used to be.”

  “Well, I think that’s what we’re trying to get at,” Clémence said. “The way Austin is changing.”

  “Maybe it is, but what I mean is, the whole hippie thing gets overblown sometimes. They were always a small part of the culture, most of my high-school friends were perfectly … I mean, most of the people we knew could have been living in Madison.”

  “Why Madison?”

  “I’ve never actually been to Madison, but somewhere like that.” The car was the wrong place to have this conversation, it was too loud, and Jean couldn’t quite tell what she was arguing about anyway.

  Nathan was only partly listening, though what Jean said also set off a train of thought. Whenever he came back to Texas he felt a strange elation. He could taste it in the air coming out of the airport, even on a cool December night. Something was being communicated, a different flavor of reality. Many of his Harvard colleagues were privately educated East-Coasters who had gone from prep school to Ivy-League college to law school, without at any point h
aving to adapt to a new set of cultural norms or values, or adjust their views or manners. He liked these people, and to many of them probably seemed indistinguishable from them, after the years he had put in at Yale and Oxford, but still he liked to think … he liked to think of himself as somebody who didn’t entirely belong.

  His high-school friends were nothing like his college friends or law-school colleagues, but he kept in touch with them lovingly or conscientiously, deliberately, and every time he came home again, to Austin, made a point of hanging out and doing whatever they wanted to do. Some of them even now, in their early forties, worked part-time jobs while they tried to get a new band off the ground. One of them waited tables in a Mexican restaurant (high-end interior cuisine) and spent his free time making stuff out of metal, yard art, whatever you want to call it. Another was a nurse at St. David’s but had also appeared in several independent movies as an extra. They rented apartments or still lived with their parents. A few of them had kids with women they weren’t together with anymore, but still they did a lot of childcare, they were always around, they had time on their hands. They made time for Nathan, too.

  When he set off for T. F. Green, he wore his conference suit, a casual Nicole Farhi, with a white shirt, open-necked, and cuff links that Judge Schuyler had given him after he finished clerking. But in the morning, in Austin, he would pull on a pair of ragged shorts and his ten-dollar discount Nikes and not care. If Texas was somewhere he had escaped from (and that’s what it felt like, when he got to Yale), it was also somewhere he could escape to.

  He heard Julie say, “Can you stop talking? I’m trying to sleep,” and her mother say, “All right, all right, everybody sleep.” Clémence leaned back, so that Julie could rest her head against her shoulder—and she closed her eyes, too, disappearing into the dark and noise of the back seat.

  Jean, after a minute (feeling in spite of herself slightly rebuked), said to Nathan in an undertone, “You doing all right? I know you don’t like to drive at night.”

  “There are some Fritos in my briefcase. Maybe if I eat something.”

  “I can take over if you want me to.”

  “I’ll be fine if you get me the chips.”

  So that’s what she did, holding them out for him to dig his hand in while he drove—she could smell the salt and the corn, and took a few herself, licking her fingers afterward to get the oil off, and drying them on her jeans. But then she had another handful, and another.

  Nathan said, “You must be pretty tired yourself.”

  “I’m all right.”

  The road was even emptier now than when Jean had driven up. It was after eleven, the land was flat, unlit, the grassy verge by the highway stretched away into nothing much. All this land … and from time to time Nathan flashed his brights to see the lanes ahead of him, the concrete gray seemed to jump into the beams, but then he dipped them again as a pair of headlights slid through the dark, coming the other way. But the noise of the car seemed to have done the trick—in his rearview mirror he could see Julie lying with her head on Clémence’s shoulder. Clémence had her eyes closed, too, it was after midnight East Coast time, and they’d had a fight on the road to Providence.

  She liked spending Christmas in Cambridge, where there was a reasonable chance of snow. The rest of their lives were diluted by colleagues, work, ambition, travel. Their house was large and the law school used it (Nathan ran a series of guest lectures on international law) to host various events and prominent visitors. The kids had to deal with the fact that for six or seven nights a month their house, at least the downstairs area, the kitchen and living room, was a public space, but at Christmas, for a few days … She had family, too, in Montreal, but she liked to hunker down, and this wild-goose chase, which is what it seemed to her … which he didn’t entirely disagree with, but after they had decided to come—“you decided”—there didn’t seem any point in arguing. When they caught the flight to Charlotte, by which point, obviously, they just had to make it to Texas, Clémence shifted ground, she flipped the switch and stopped complaining, but this also made Nathan feel slightly cut off. Waiting for their bags in DFW, she suddenly leaned against him and said, “Your crazy family,” but she was smiling, too, and the fight had been resolved.

  “I know, I know.”

  “It’s very sweet of Jean to come and get us. It’s totally insane but it’s also very sweet.”

  “She wanted us to come.”

  “I’m thinking about you, too. You need a break, too.”

  “Well, this is a break.”

  But she didn’t say anything, and it’s true, Nathan sometimes fought with his family, with Liesel especially, he felt an implicit … the status he had in other areas of his life was not always … the respect he received … this isn’t the kind of thing you can explain to your brother or sisters, or expect them to … especially when there are other things you also need to explain. Anxieties, ambitions, if they’re going to understand. But half-listening to Jean and Clémence he realized that even though they weren’t arguing in this case at least he was probably on his sister’s side … about Austin and the tone of Clémence’s curiosity. It’s very hard to take sides … you don’t actually have to take sides … and yet, when everybody comes together, you can’t help but feel the pull of different allegiances. He was starting to drift off, the road ahead of him had set up a pattern for his thoughts, or a rhythm, and in the middle of the pattern or rhythm it was difficult to tell if being conscious of it was the same thing as being awake. So he reached for another handful of Fritos and said to his sister, to keep her talking and break the pattern, “Diga me.”

  “What do you want to talk about?” Jean said.

  “Anything. Just to wake me up.”

  “I can drive. It’s fine.”

  “How’s Henrik?”

  “He’s all right,” she said. “He’s in Pembrokeshire with the kids.”

  “When’s he coming?”

  “Boxing Day.” And that’s all she said.

  Maybe ten minutes later, when he saw the exit for a gas station, sitting in a pool of light by the side of the road, he pulled off. “I’m sorry,” he said to Jean. “You’ll have to take over. I’ve been sleeping very badly.”

  He got out to fill the tank—under a huge sky, partly covered in clouds, but there were also ragged gaps full of stars, and very little light pollution. The universe seemed strangely flat over his head; tired, he also felt the chill of it and shivered. There was a kind of wide general wind with nothing to stop it or deflect it moving in no particular hurry across the landscape. Jean switched over to the driver’s seat and adjusted the mirrors. When he got in the car, she said, “Why are you sleeping so badly?”

  “I wake up at three. For no reason. And when I can’t get back to sleep figure I may as well work.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Various articles. I don’t want to talk about them.” And then: “You must be exhausted, too.”

  “You mean the jet lag? I feel okay. I seem to have come through to the other side.” After she pulled out onto the highway again, waiting for a pair of dots of light to pass by, she told him: “It’s fine if you want to go to sleep. I’m fine.”

  “No,” he said, “I can talk, I want to talk,” but he closed his eyes, and in a few minutes Jean felt the vague shift in atmosphere in the car that you get when everyone around you is asleep. Clémence was visible in the rearview mirror. She lay with her head back and her mouth open, and looked strangely vulnerable. Less pretty, less self-conscious, with her black-and-white hair spread out against the headrest and her neck exposed. On an empty stretch of highway Jean turned around quickly to check the kids. Margot, seven years old but still the family baby, had slipped the upper part of her seatbelt and slept with her head on her mother’s lap. Julie, leaning away, had tucked herself into the corner of the car, against the door. It was like spying through the window of her brother’s house, where this kind of thing goes on every night.
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  For the next two hours she drove like that, through dark Texas, listening to the noise of the road, until she turned into the driveway at Wheeler Street, and the clank of the dip woke Nathan. Then she carried the suitcases into the house, while he and Clémence dealt with the girls. Liesel was still up, in her nightgown—she came to the door as soon as the Volvo pulled in, and stood in the doorway, in the hall-light, in her bare feet.

  MONDAY

  When Bill woke up, he felt a strange charge in the room, a kind of cold glow; he didn’t know where he was. Usually he got up in the dark and went downstairs through the childless house to watch TV. Around five or six in the morning: sometimes the news or Sportscenter, but they also showed reruns of American Pickers or Auction Hunters at that time. Bill had a big appetite for anything about antiques. But now the curtains next to the bed, a dingy pattern (once bright and still too busy), revealed a kind of pressure of light behind them, and he remembered. God knows why he had slept so long. The bedside table was cluttered with magazines and framed photographs, but he found his wristwatch and checked the time: almost eight. And when he stood up and pulled the curtains the reason for the glow became clear. Overnight snow, the storm had come through. Everything was white; he thought, Liesel should see this. This is one of the things she misses by living in Texas—real winters.

  Last night he had a fight with Judith about who should sleep in Rose’s room. Not a fight exactly, but every conversation with his niece involved some kind of battle or at least lengthy explanation. She was a woman with too much time on her hands; instead of doing anything she liked to talk. When he got back from the hospital the night before he found Judith, in her own phrase, in the middle of cleaning the house. But she wasn’t actually cleaning anything. She was going from room to room with a garbage bag in her hands—and not throwing much away either. Everything had to be looked at. What she really needed was an audience, and once Bill came, well … I mean, look at the way she lives. Every time I come home we have this fight. It’s depressing. This is what happens when … when you live for your marriage, when you live for your daughter, Bill thought. When your husband moves out and your daughter grows up. Why should she throw anything away? What does she need the space for? But he basically agreed with his niece—it’s depressing.