Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  Paul showed up around eleven o’clock. On the long drive over from Wimberley he always felt a kind of insatiable eagerness to arrive, the way he used to feel after school, running into the backyard after Bill picked him up … he didn’t want to miss out, there were people having fun or just hanging out, but then as he got nearer his eagerness always turned into something else, it seemed to thicken into a kind of reluctance. The pressure of all these intimacies. “Hello?” he called out, letting himself in, but nobody answered and he walked past the living-room doors and down the hallway listening for signs of life. Susie was still in the kitchen, with May in a high chair and her hands full of paint—she had a piece of white paper she was smearing them across. Liesel sat there, too, with a cold cup of coffee on the table. She was reading the New York Times, taking a few minutes, preparing herself for a day of activity. The first job on her list was going shopping, but Nathan hadn’t told her yet what to buy.

  “Where is everybody?” Paul asked.

  “Hello to you, too,” Susie said. Then Dana walked in the backdoor, carrying Cal, who was crying. It wasn’t easy opening the screen with the big kid in her arms, she had to use her butt to prop it, and then somehow turn the handle of the main door with her arms full.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing. He fell over.”

  “Hey, Buddy.” But Cal put his face in his mother’s neck.

  “He’s not very well,” she said. “He’s got a fever.”

  “So what’s he doing running around outside?”

  “He’s—that’s what he wanted—you look after him,” she said, pushing past.

  “Okay. Fine with me.” But Dana had gone; she was taking him upstairs—to get out of the crowd and give him more Tylenol. Just to get away from everybody and spend a half hour on her own, with her son, behind a closed door.

  “Where is everybody?” he said again. There were some pastries left in a basket on the table, which had only been partly cleared. Paul took one and ate. His fingers grew sticky with powder, which also dusted the cloth. “These are semi-disgusting,” he said, taking another. He had run just after sunrise, at seven-thirty, and always around eleven hit a sugar low.

  “Ben is reading. Willy and Margot are playing in the yard. Clémence has taken Julie for a walk—I think they’re going to the bookshop. Nathan is working. David is talking to his mother, at least he was. Is that everybody? Have I missed anyone out?”

  “What’s wrong with Cal?”

  “He’s sick,” Susie said. For some reason it annoyed her the way he walked in like that, expecting her to fill in the details, which were really his business. It didn’t help that Nathan was lying in bed with the computer on his lap, and David had spent the last half hour on the phone while she sat around with May picking things off the floor.

  Paul could have gone upstairs to check on Dana, and part of him figured that’s probably what he should do, even though he also guessed that Dana wanted to be left alone. But there was really nothing else for him to do. This wasn’t his house anymore, it’s not where he lived, so he could sit around while May spread paint on the tablecloth or he could read the newspaper or watch TV, but instead he went outside into the mild cold overcast Texan winter day to see what Willy was up to. Because already a slight … not reliance or relation … had been formed, but a realization, on Paul’s part, that he could appeal to the kid in a way that he was particularly skilled at, that the kid responded to. They weren’t in the backyard, so far as he could tell, but then he saw that the playhouse door was open, about fifty feet away, and he walked taking his time across the sharp damp grass, past the gazebo and the silent fountain, toward the little white shed with a blue trim and a small veranda under the pecan tree.

  Jean was there, too, sitting inside on a kid’s chair with a slightly warped Seventies-style veneer coffee table up against her knees, on which she had placed cans of tomato soup and kidney beans and baked beans and tuna fish and even a tall glass jar of hot dogs. She had stuck Post-it notes with prices on most of the cans, and she had a pad of the Post-it notes on her lap, and Willy and Margo were picking over a bowl full of real loose change, which included a lot of foreign currency, to see what they could buy.

  “Have you come to relieve me?” Jean said.

  “What happened to Cal?”

  “He’s just … he was just feeling a little sorry for himself. He seems to be having one of those mornings where everything hurts.”

  The playhouse got used as a furniture dumping ground. It was very dusty inside and even colder than the backyard, because of the shade of the pecan tree, which meant the windows didn’t receive much light. The smell was the smell of a storeroom, the chill inside had a slightly neglected or refrigerated quality, and Jean, if she wanted, could breathe so she could see her breath. Part of her had wanted to show off how good she was with kids, but the problem was you never really had an audience for that kind of thing because as soon as you were occupying them their parents had a tendency to disappear. Unless you count the kids as audience, which made her think, my motives aren’t exactly strictly honorable, and almost as a kind of penance she kept the shopping game going, even when in normal conditions her patience for it might have run out.

  “You get back all right last night?” Paul said.

  “It was fine.”

  The kids were still looking through the bowl, holding up coins from time to time and saying, How much is that worth? Margot said, “Is this real money?” and Jean took it and turned it over between thumb and forefinger: silver, slight, with an eagle on the back and 1 DEUTSCHE MARK 1991 stippled on the other side.

  “It’s real,” she said, giving it back.

  “Can we—can we buy something with it?”

  “What do you want to buy?”

  “I mean, something real?”

  “Not with that,” Jean said, “not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a little complicated. People don’t use that kind of money now.”

  Paul listened to this for a while and then he said to Jean, “You’re a good auntie.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a good sister,” and she looked up at him, with a kind of deprecating frown that seemed to Paul to suggest a certain amount of real emotion surprisingly near the surface.

  “Why do we have … this money if it doesn’t work?” Margot asked.

  “It used to work, it’s just …” and Paul turned to Willy and said, “You want to play tennis?”

  Willy looked up quickly and said, “Okay.”

  “Can I play, too?” Margot asked.

  “Everybody can play.”

  “But you don’t know how to play,” Willy said to his cousin.

  “You don’t either.”

  “I do. I played yesterday. Ask Uncle Paul …” and this kept going while they all walked back to the house to get rackets and balls. On the patio they ran into Nathan, still dressed in shorts and cheap running shoes and his old green parka, stepping out of his room, whose sliding glass door overlooked the backyard, and Nathan said to Paul, “What are you doing right now?”

  “I was going to play tennis with the kids.”

  “Come shopping with me.”

  “Nice to see you, too,” Paul said.

  “He just promised to play tennis,” Jean said.

  “Well, the kids can come, too. Come on, Margot. I want to show you the supermarket, it’s a famous supermarket.” But in the end, neither of them wanted to go and Paul and Nathan set off alone. Liesel gave them a list.

  *

  Whenever Nathan came back to Austin, he felt a burst of restlessness—he couldn’t tell exactly if it was happy or not, the restlessness of excitement or something else. He borrowed the Volvo keys from Liesel and even though Paul lived in Texas and had his own car, Nathan assumed they would take the Volvo and that he would drive. He got behind the wheel, and Paul, without saying anything or even minding, sat in the passenger s
eat.

  “I love this car, this is a great car,” Nathan said, looking over his shoulder and pulling out. Across the road, Dodie, the old lady who had been living in the neighborhood since the Essingers moved in, stood in her front yard, doing nothing much but wearing gardening gloves and Nathan, as he turned the car in the road, lowered his window and waved to her. She acknowledged him without waving back, a short bone-skinny figure, with a face you couldn’t easily read behind her thick glasses.

  Nathan, when he saw her, was reminded of how much he liked Austin, that it could produce such people—independent, dignified, unobtrusive, free-thinking … Around election time she always stuck a simple blue-and-white Lloyd Doggett US Congress sign in her front yard. Nathan once interviewed her for a high-school project, and she sat with him for half an hour on her screen porch. She gave him a cup of tea, and she answered his questions politely and he couldn’t help thinking that there was something about him that she didn’t entirely trust—something flashy or intellectual, which upset him only slightly at the time and didn’t really dent his opinion of her, or change the way he wanted to think about her as an example of something important about his hometown. One of his moods was a kind of genuine but also semi-deliberate enthusiasm, for life and everyone, and he felt a surge of this now, as he drove up Wheeler Street, under the arch of its trees, past its grand but still idiosyncratic upper-middle class houses, with their yellowing wintry front yards, and richly watered potted plants, and rusting yard art, toward 32nd Street and then the traffic of Guadalupe.

  Paul said, “It can go from zero to sixty in less than two minutes.”

  But Nathan couldn’t remember what they were talking about. Part of his burst of enthusiasm was just a kind of revving the engine, testing it out, getting ready to go; he felt it was his job while he was around to address certain family problems, to think about them and make other people think about them, and on this holiday those problems included Paul. His brother looked almost painfully skinny. The muscle mass of his tennis-playing days, the forearm strength and core stability, weren’t necessary to him anymore; all he did was run and bike, and what was left of him now after a year of retirement looked not only lean but almost eager and hungry—underfed. His T-shirt looked like it was hanging on a coat hanger; when he smiled you could imagine the skull. Nathan was merging now into the median lane, preparing to turn, and he said to Paul, not looking at him but waiting for a break in the traffic, “Talk to me now. What’s going on with you and Dana.”

  “There’s nothing … ongoing. Liesel for some reason … Liesel invited her to come for Christmas. Without asking me. As far as I’m concerned …” but he didn’t want to say it.

  “As far as you’re concerned what?”

  “Well it’s not like we were ever married.”

  “That’s neither here nor … I mean … that’s just a total …”

  “Well, we had a disagreement. About how we wanted to live. And I didn’t see that there was any way of splitting the difference.”

  “How do you want to live?” With his eye on the road it was easier to ask these questions, but part of him was also taking in Flamingo Automotive, where Bill got his car serviced—a Fifties brick and glass box, classy in a rundown kind of way, next to the ice-cream parlor where he briefly worked in high school. On either side of the five-lane road were storefronts and cafés, most of them changed since he was a kid, but the feel was the same, car culture, wide skies. Then the light turned and he turned with it onto 38th Street.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said, in a different tone. “Maybe I mean where we wanted to live, but that’s just part of it. It seemed like we stopped getting along and then it was like we didn’t really want to anymore.”

  It’s a five-minute drive from Wheeler Street to Central Market. Nathan pulled into the parking lot and started looking for a space—he had to circle up and down the aisles, the last-minute Christmas crush had arrived, and he waited for a guy in a Nissan Qashqai to back out before taking his spot. The guy had his window open and they could hear the beeping of the video monitor as he reversed. Paul said, “Honestly it seemed like it was easier for both of us when we just … I don’t know … left each other alone. I mean, it’s been easier with Cal, too.”

  “That’s unlikely to be true,” Nathan said.

  After that they went shopping. Central Market was one of these recent Austin developments, a high-end incarnation of an old local chain, arranged not in columns and rows but in a kind of snakes-and-ladders setup that forced you to follow the path from beginning to end: past bands of fresh-color, imported apples (Fuji, Lady Alice, Northern Spy), Texas grapefruits and oranges, watermelons, cantaloupes, honey dew, then squash, pumpkins, potatoes, radishes, carrots, lettuces of every variety and shade, from pale underbelly green to cabbagey purple, everything laid out like an art installation. Even the fish counter seemed color-coordinated, like a pharmacy shelf, salmon steaks grading to swordfish, and they pushed past illustrated maps of cheese, where each country sported its own toothpick flag. This is the kind of thing yuppies do well, there’s no point pretending otherwise, but it was stressful, too, in the late Christmas rush, trying to find everything, doubling back along secret cut-throughs, trying to locate this or that in all the plenty. Paul said to him, holding up what looked like a carton of cream cheese, “Are we the kind of people who spend $9.98 on rendered duck fat?” And Nathan said, “These are the questions you ask yourself,” but took it anyway and put it back in the cart—for roast potatoes. Feeling mildly annoyed. There was an old family argument about the way Nathan lived, his suits and wines, but he didn’t want to get into it now. At the checkout Paul let his brother pay.

  Afterward, Nathan suggested that they get a cup of coffee from Houndstooth, the hipster coffee shop across the road (glass walls, concrete floors), and they loaded the shopping bags into the Volvo and waited for a gap in the traffic then jogged across. Paul didn’t drink coffee but sat outside at one of the tables and waited for Nathan while he ordered, and then waited for him to drink it, too. The weather was changing, like it had the day before, and a cold white cloudy morning was giving way to a clear mild blue and yellow afternoon. Cars moved past on 38th Street, but you get used to them. It’s a kind of life like anything else, like birds flying past in V-formations … and sitting on the sidewalk, by the parking lot, watching the traffic, you felt like someone sitting on the docks, watching the boats come in.

  “Maybe we should all move back,” Nathan said. “This is good coffee.”

  “A lot of fancy beards.”

  “Well, that’s the price you pay.”

  For some reason it annoyed Paul, his brother’s enthusiasm, even though Paul had moved back, and at various points had tried to persuade other people to come along. But when Nathan’s in this mood of life appreciation you can’t really win. There’s nothing you can say (apart from agreeing all the time) that doesn’t sound churlish, and anyway it’s nice enough feeling the temperature rise and taking off your sweatshirt, feeling cold but also feeling the sun on your skin and the little hairs along your forearms uncurling. But what he said was: “We should probably get back. Dana’s had Cal all morning.”

  “Are you guys seeing other people?”

  “I don’t know. She might be. We don’t really … we don’t really talk about it.”

  “And you?”

  “Who would I see? You know where I live; there’s nothing there. I go running, I go biking, I read. Sometimes I drive over to see Bill and Liesel. That’s pretty much it.”

  “These are all choices, right. They can be chosen different.”

  Paul didn’t look at his brother but felt that something was being asserted, something he was basically grateful for, a role or a wisdom or whatever, and part of what he was grateful for is that it gave him a chance to say the kind of thing he had on his mind, the sort of explanation or formulation he had practiced or polished to himself, on long runs, in the shower afterward, at night when he couldn’t slee
p, alone in his house watching TV, and which you never in ordinary life get to say. So he said it.

  “Maybe they can, but it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even know what you’re supposed to want from them anymore.”

  “What do you mean, them?”

  “Women, pretty girls.”

  Nathan, trying to kid him out of it: “I think you know what people want.”

  “I’m not,” but he didn’t want to be kidded, he was trying to explain himself, these were conversations he had with himself all the time, and after a while you can’t tell if they make sense. “I’m not talking about … I’m not talking about anything crude. But there’s a whole—I mean, there’s a whole kind of esteem or pleasure, which you’re supposed to get from these interactions, right? I mean, that’s the system, isn’t it, it’s almost like we’re trained to want … But it’s like I can’t remember why I’m supposed to try to make them like me. I don’t understand what it’s supposed to prove. I mean, why these people? Why pretty girls? Of all the people, whose … approval or understanding… I’m aware that I’m not really …”

  “No, I get it, it’s a … I understand.” But he didn’t know what to say, and after a minute Paul said, “Should we go?”

  *

  For the rest of the day, while Nathan put away the shopping and then had lunch, while he prepared the kitchen afterward for cooking Christmas dinner, and then retired to his room and lay in bed, napping and working until it was time to put the bird in the oven; while he chopped boiled glazed roasted, taking over the counter space, filling the sink with dirty pots, which Jean mostly cleaned up as they went along; while he ate dinner, selecting different wines for each course, pouring and drinking, and later still when they transferred to the living room and gave out presents (everybody let the kids stay up late), and he fell asleep on the couch, in front of the fire, aware of the conversations around him, and Clémence telling him, go to bed, and Liesel joining in, he had this conversation on the back of his mind. He had been presented with an argument and needed to find the counterargument, it was important that he … but that’s not really what was on his mind. Seeing Paul like that, with his skinny face, and a kind of almost … evangelical intensity …