Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  The house had a little portico outside the entrance, with four or five steps leading to the driveway. Paul offered to carry the stroller but she bumped it down slowly and even before they reached the sidewalk Cal had shut his eyes and turned his head against the little triangle of rayon or plastic or whatever it was called between the upright and horizontal bars of the Maclaren. She bent over and tucked the blanket around his neck. It always surprised her when the sun went down, how cold it got in Texas, especially on a clear night. The stars seemed close and the sky didn’t offer much protection—if Paul had put his arm around her, for warmth, she wouldn’t have minded, but he was walking the way he usually walked in his old neighborhood, in the middle of the road because the streets were quiet enough it didn’t matter.

  Wheeler Street T-junctioned at a park, or really just a field with a creek cutting through it, and the kids crossed over and ran through the grass toward the water. “Don’t go too close,” Susie said. There was a drop of five feet from the field to the creek bed; limestone walls had been built to hold it in. Sometimes, in summer, during a flash flood, the water level rose two or three feet an hour, but now on a cold night after a dry December the current was more like a long thin irregular puddle edged with slime and reeds. Ben had the two younger kids in tow and was telling jokes or stories while Julie slightly resentfully and feeling left out went over in the dark to hold her mother’s hand.

  Clémence gave her a squeeze of vague sympathy. She had been thinking, maybe I should knock on a few doors tonight and talk to a few people, just to get a sense of what I’m talking about. But she didn’t want to annoy Liesel, with whom she had a friendly but also slightly formal relationship. She was aware of Liesel as someone who held strong and not always entirely consistent opinions—you could never tell what she might find annoying. In general, Clémence got along well with her in-laws and genuinely liked them, too, though at the same time she felt that their level of interdependence was not entirely a source of comfort and joy to Nathan. He seemed to bear more of the responsibility and receive less of the sympathy than the others, so that when he came home and entered again into all of these slightly intense relationships …

  Of course, her family had its own craziness. Her mother and sister lived on the same street in Montreal, which meant that most of what she heard from each of them was complaints about the other. Her theory was, listen to everybody but don’t pay too much attention. She said to Nathan, not all of these problems are your problems anymore. But that’s how he took it. While for her it was easy enough to treat the Essingers as what they basically were, nice, interesting people, who, if you met them at a party … so that’s how she treated them.

  Liesel said, “Es tut mir Leid, Kinder,” and then, in English, “I’m sorry, I can’t keep up. I don’t see so well in the dark,” and Susie, who was walking with May asleep on her breast, strapped in the BabyBjörn, slowed down and took her arm. Clémence fell back, too, and Liesel said to Julie, “What did you to today? I sit at my desk and don’t get anything done, and I don’t even see anybody, I just sit there.”

  “We played in the playhouse,” Julie said.

  They had come to the end of the park, and the road passed darkly between two large houses—there was no sidewalk and everyone walked on the asphalt, including Dana, pushing the stroller, while David went ahead to catch up with Paul. The house on the other side of the road had boarded-up windows. It used to be very grand and still had an air of faded good times, cocktail parties and piano lessons, the sort of house where the girls in the family learn to ride, whitewashed brick, peaked roof, a large plot of lawn, and Paul said, “Susie’s best friend lived there, Chantal Breuer. She was the only other Jewish kid in the neighborhood. When I was seven they used to make me pass notes between them—I mean, between the houses. They called me the Messenger, I think they even dressed me up. Maybe I was a little older.”

  “You have obviously suffered a great deal,” David said.

  “I rode my bike.”

  “Did you read the notes?”

  “No, they were just … I’m pretty sure they were just … that wasn’t really the point. But I didn’t read them.”

  “Do you know what the playhouse was originally?” Liesel asked Julie.

  “A playhouse?”

  Liesel couldn’t read her tone, whether she wanted to hear or not, but went on anyway. “The old lady who sold us the house was a widow—she had been living alone for a long time. It was her servant who lived in the playhouse. His name was Mosby, I don’t know his first name.”

  “Why didn’t he live in the house?” Julie asked.

  “He was … this is a difficult question to answer. He was black, and the old lady …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The truth is, I don’t really understand it myself. But at that time, in Texas …”

  “What does it matter, if he was black?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me, but at that time … it’s possible he wouldn’t have wanted to sleep in the house. He might not have felt comfortable.”

  “Of course he wanted to sleep in the house,” Julie said. “I mean, the playhouse, it’s like … there’s no water … there’s no—he must have been cold.”

  “You forget that in Texas for most of the year it’s too hot.”

  “Then he would have been too hot.”

  “But in those days nobody had air-conditioning anyway. And the playhouse was always very cool. It has the pecan tree standing over it, and a room that size, if you open the windows and the door …”

  “I’m sorry, Liesel, but this is … I don’t even think you believe what you’re saying.”

  She was almost as tall as her grandmother now, and with her short hair, in the dark, she looked like a woman, too. Her voice had changed, you could still hear her father in it, but somehow that mattered less—it didn’t seem like an imitation anymore. After a while, after you grow up, it doesn’t matter what the influences are, you’re stuck with them. And Liesel could have the same fights with her that she had with Nathan.

  “There are other reasons he might have felt uncomfortable. I mean, for his sake, too. Because if people knew that he was living in the house with a white woman, it could have made his life very difficult.”

  “But that’s what I mean. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “What interests me, about all this, is the way that people, in spite of terrible … somehow at the same time they manage to maintain … When she died, I mean the old woman—I never knew her of course, because we bought the house only afterward. But Dodie, the lady across the road, knew her, she used to tell me stories. When she died he was sitting with her. She had bowel cancer, which is also what my mother died of, and it can be very painful toward the end, the doctors give you morphine, mostly you just sleep, you don’t really know what’s going on. But he sat with her anyway. The doctor had told him she might not last the night and …”

  “Of course he sat with her. That’s what she paid him to do.”

  “I don’t think she paid him very much.”

  “Liesel, you’re not making any sense. Are you trying to say that he was like her slave and so …”

  “You have to understand that when I first came here, I mean to Texas, all of this was strange to me. None of it made sense. I could see that something terrible had been happening for a long time. But eventually I also learned, that in spite of everything, people as human beings sometimes …”

  “I don’t think I can have this conversation with you,” Julie said, and Clémence told her, “Enough, okay? That’s not the tone you take with your grandmother.”

  “I’m not taking a tone, I’m making an argument.”

  “Your argument has a tone.”

  “I’m sorry if you don’t like the way I sound.” And she walked off in the direction of her uncles, who were talking quietly in the middle of the road.

  “And I suppose eventually,” David said, “you developed a terrific crush on Ch
antal Breuer. This was the real point of the game.”

  “You think that was the point? I don’t know. For me I just liked … you know, being made use of, when you’re a little kid, by older kids. It’s hard for me to exaggerate the excitement of getting on my bike with an actual message. Also, I liked doing stuff for Susie, she was a good big sister. But I liked Chantal, too. She had red hair, I guess she was a little heavy, she was pretty, too. Maybe I did, I don’t know.”

  “Mais où sont les Chantal Breuers d’antan?”

  “Portland, I think. Susie would know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Julie asked, coming up behind them.

  “Girls,” one of them said, and Julie felt a little shadow of exclusion fall across her, or something else maybe, as if she was being included in a conversation she didn’t want to be included in, as a certain kind of outsider to it, which was maybe the same thing. Or disappointment, that even in her family … but it had taken her a modest dose of courage to leave one conversation, the way she had, especially after her mother’s intervention, and enter another with two grown-up men. She didn’t want to pick another fight so didn’t say anything.

  They turned right on 34th Street and then left on one of those little side alleys that still exist in Austin, in spite of all the overdevelopment, just a narrow track of broken asphalt bordered by backyards and chain-link fences. There were houses people had been living in since before the property boom—with peeling clapboard, sunken roofs, furniture in the yard and air-conditioning units bulging and dripping from the windows. At the corner lights started to appear, strung from balcony to doorway, and lining the trees, and even stretched across the surfaces of unused cars, sitting in the driveway with garbage cans. Someone had threaded little bulbs in and out of the wheels and frame of a bicycle, which rested like any bicycle on the front porch, underneath the front window, but also looked like a constellation of a bicycle, a geometric arrangement of stars. Susie caught up with Dana and said, “I guess we got two sleepers,” and Dana, turning around, glanced at May, at the awkward angle of her head as it lay against her mother’s breast (or the bony space beneath her clavicle), the cheeks squished, that look of concentrated sleep, and said, “Yours keeps you warm at least.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  And Paul, walking back toward them now, his face visible in the reflected glitter, said to Dana, “It’s like the Fourth of July out here,” and she knew what he meant. The whole length of 37th Street, from Home Lane to Guadalupe, was decked out in lights. You could almost hear the kilowatts ticking over and the bills running up. When they first started going out, about five months into their relationship, Dana got invited to the big Fourth of July party at Condé Nast—in one of those skyscrapers rising out of the mess of Times Square, above the fray. Paul had just come back from Wimbledon, where he had lost in the first round, and was still feeling jet-lagged and antisocial. Making plans around tournament time was always difficult, you never knew how long you’d be out of action, so he tended to require the girlfriends in his life, if he was at all serious about them, to be willing to shut down their social calendars at the same time he did. But it was early days with Dana and when he lost she managed to get him another ticket to the party, which he didn’t want. They had a fight at her apartment, while he waited for her to get dressed, and kept it going in the taxi afterward, but she felt it somehow important at this stage to maintain at least the surface obligations of her own life, because in the past, when she got caught up with some guy, she had a tendency to … but the truth is, she didn’t really want to go either.

  There was a line at security as they waited to get in, and then another outside the elevator, and the whole time Paul, in actually kind of a friendly voice, kept saying, “Let’s just get out of here, I’m hungry. Let’s get some pizza,” and Dana answered, “We’re here now, let’s just …” and he said, “What’s here, we’re waiting in a line …” but the line moved on, and they were pulled along with it, into the elevator and up.

  Waitresses in little black dresses handed them champagne as they stepped out, and Dana said, “Look, isn’t this …” and drank and felt the bubbles rising in her nose, the heat of people, the noise, the view around them of the floor-to-ceiling windows, all of this got her blood racing, because she looked good and didn’t mind feeling the effects of it once in a while. But the whole time Paul stood around waiting for her to finish her conversations. He didn’t know anyone there, and trying to get him to join in was like pulling teeth … so whereas before she felt mildly sympathetic and ambivalent herself, after ten or fifteen minutes something cool and polished in her personality, which she had access to and had probably inherited from her mother, took over, and she started to enjoy herself. I mean, fuck him. So that when the fireworks started (even at that height, you could hear the faint percussion) and bloomed against the windows, with Manhattan itself lit up around her, and spread out underneath, the dark stain of Central Park, the ridiculous neon traffic-jam of Times Square, she let her natural appetite for glamour and extravagance and … feeling like, this is where the action is, this is where people want to be, here, living like this … express itself in her reactions, until he said, “Oh for God’s sake you don’t have to pretend to like it just to piss me off …” And because part of what she wanted was to be there with him, the tears in her eyes changed meaning almost instantly, though what he meant by referring to this now, years later, if by way of apology or something else, she couldn’t tell. But she said anyway, just to show she got the reference, “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen …” and felt like she was giving in to him again.

  *

  Jean and Nathan worked hard to get the dinner ready before everyone came back. Liesel had already set the table—Paul carried the trestles in from the garage apartment, to extend it, and they laid two cloths over the whole thing, which was almost ten feet long now and could seat twelve people comfortably enough, with two kids at each end. This was fine, so long as May didn’t eat (her high chair took up a lot of room) and Cal stayed asleep or sat on somebody’s lap. The good china lived in the armoire next to Liesel’s study, where they also kept the wine. It was a wedding present and part of what Liesel thought about every time she brought it out was how her tastes had changed, because this is what she had asked for from her mother forty-odd years ago: a set of Royal Bavarian Hutschenreuther dinnerware, birds and flowers on pale white porcelain, with a blue rim. None of her kids would want to inherit it, but still she brought it out on special occasions.

  The goose was done and sitting in its tray, draining fat, and Nathan had turned up the heat on the roast potatoes. Jean kept running back and forth to the garage apartment, which Nathan and his family were sleeping in. It had its own kitchen and another oven, where her Dauphinoise potatoes had started to brown nicely. (As soon as he woke up, she put them in.) She didn’t want the cream to split, but it was an old oven and the temperature was hard to predict or control. Jean was also in charge of the vegetarian stuffing and every time she carried something from one kitchen to the other, she had to go through the sliding door and into the cool night air, under the starry sky, then up the back steps and past the screen (pulling at it with a loose finger, propping it open with her butt) and through the backdoor … Her face had gone red with concentration and worry, she kept drying her hands on her apron, and the flesh around her fingernails looked scuffed or abraded. In general she was a high-frequency Purell-using kind of girl, and since Henrik’s illness, keeping her hands germ-free had become a mild obsession. When she cooked she washed them constantly.

  She had seven or eight things on her mind, she was running back and forth, but there were also moments when they both just stood around in the kitchen waiting for the next bell to ding. In one of them Nathan said to her, “When’s Henrik getting in?” and she said, “Boxing Day. He’s taking the BA flight, which gets in around four. He’s asked me to marry him, when the divorce comes through.”

 
“What did you say?”

  “I said, let’s wait until you meet my family.”

  “Are you trying to put him off?” Nathan said.

  For the past hour, ever since Jean woke him up, he had felt vaguely underwater, in the depths of something, or the grips of something, but this pulled him to the surface. He needed to concentrate; he needed to think this through.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I want him to … maybe I’m looking for a second opinion. It still feels like … I’m thirty-two years old, but it still feels like … I need a note from home to skip school.”

  “This isn’t skipping school.”

  “I know what it is,” she said.

  “What’s going to happen with his kids?”

  “Nothing different. The current arrangement is Wednesdays and every other weekend. That’s what we’ve been doing.”

  “Does he want more kids? Is that something you want? Is that something you’ve talked about?”

  “We’ve talked about it. My answer is yes. His answer isn’t exactly … definitive, at least not yet. He says it’s something he’s willing to think about.”

  “Because in my experience that’s something he needs to think about now.”

  “Of course he thinks about it. Of course we talk about it, Nathan. I mean, but give the guy a break, right. I’m not exactly in a position to push him. He’s just gone through chemo, he’s just coming through a divorce …”