Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  Jean got up in her stiff dress to turn on the overhead lamp and Nathan and Paul pinched out the candle flames. Susie let May sit on the carpet and tear at her pile of presents, which were heaped under a corner of the coffee table, and eventually Liesel pushed herself out of the bentwood chair to get a garbage bag from the laundry room. It wasn’t so much an opening as an excavation. Susie tried to rescue some of the prettier paper from her daughter’s clutches, smoothing it out and laying it down in a separate pile for reuse. But May was tired, it was several hours past her bedtime, and another hour later because of the time difference. There were lots of little battles being fought, and it got to the point where … even if you gave in to her it wasn’t enough, her feelings of frustration and reproach had become too general.

  Until Nathan said, “I think we need to speed things up,” and Susie, still faintly in conflict with him for reasons she couldn’t have articulated, responded: “In that case somebody else can deal with her,” because she had been carrying May around since … God knows where David is … you would have thought, maybe, he wanted to see his … while she got down on hands and knees to retrieve torn sheets of wrapping paper from under the table. Clémence picked up the little girl (to compensate for Nathan’s tone) and said, without total conviction, “I miss having babies in my life.” But then May started crying and butting her head against her, she tore at the shawl around her neck, to pull it away. “It’s no good,” Clémence told her, standing up and jigging from side to side, “I haven’t got any milk,” in a pillow-talk kind of voice but also for public consumption, until Paul offered to take the baby off her hands. “Can I try,” he said, “I never get to see her,” for which she was almost grateful although she also felt like some kind of judgment had been made, especially when, against the heat of her uncle’s chest, May fell asleep. Paul sang to her, the way he used to sing to Cal, in an undertone, Who can retell the things that befell us—who—can—count—them … while Dana watched and David came back from the bathroom, drying his hands on the seat of his pants.

  The kids got their presents first, in order of age, so it was Cal’s turn next and Dana said to Paul, “I don’t want Cal to miss the whole thing,” and he said, “Well, what do you want to do?”—but softer than usual, less insistent. “I want him to at least open his eyes and see it … I want him to have some kind of memory,” and Paul, still circling, in a slow rhythm, with his face in May’s soft hair, said “I’ve kind of got my hands full.” She went over to the stroller and lifted him out. “Hey, Buddy, it’s present time.” “Isn’t it always?” Jean said, and Cal looked out through fever-dreams and sat on Dana’s lap happily enough but was otherwise unresponsive … so that his mother unwrapped the presents for him, and said thank you for him, and then it was Willy’s turn. Paul had given him a tennis racket, and Dana thought, But that’s what you just gave Cal, and Willy ran up to his uncle who turned his back slightly to protect the baby so that Willy ended up holding him by the leg. “We can hit around tomorrow,” Paul said. And then, turning to Dana, because he sensed or felt something of what she was feeling: “Maybe one night before you go … maybe you and Cal could stay with me.” Dana didn’t answer and Paul went on: “I mean, there are plenty of bedrooms.”

  After the presents, in a softened mood, Liesel asked whoever was listening if they wanted to look at her father’s letters, and Paul (still holding the baby) followed Susie into the study. Then Susie called to David, because she thought they might interest him and she wanted to make up, while Dana, feeling left out but also glad of the excuse to get away, put Cal to bed upstairs. (For a few minutes, in the dark, while he settled, she sat on her bed and wondered if she could call or text Stephen in New York. In the end she took out her phone and checked email but didn’t call.) It was about ten o’clock, Clémence had started on the dishes in the kitchen, and Jean was making custard, while Nathan carried the Christmas pudding to the microwave in the laundry room. David put on his glasses and bent over the desk, and Susie translated on the spot: The dinner table is very jolly—last night we ate Königsberger Klopse! Things are looking up … they shot two deserters, and since then, discipline has improved.

  They waited until Dana came down before Nathan poured brandy on the pudding and set it alight—the blue flame was the ghost of a flame, and Dana had time to take several pictures before it disappeared—and after he finished his portion Paul said he had a long drive back to Wimberley. He still had May in his arms (eating had involved leaning awkwardly to the side), but Susie took her away, and after that he sat for a minute on the sofa feeling like … well, I said I was going to go. So he left—Liesel looked at him with wet eyes. There was something strangely formal and deliberate about his leaving, almost fake or somehow staged, which he felt, too. They could see him from the living room walking down the steps of the front porch and past the Volvo along the drive. “I think that’s my cue,” Susie announced, breaking the spell. “I don’t mind doing the dishes in the morning, but right now I’m going to bed.” And she carried May, still fast asleep, toward the staircase, with Willy trailing behind.

  The big kids were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted. Julie was reading her Kindle, she had been given a fifty-dollar voucher, and Ben lay on his back in front of the fire playing games on Susie’s phone. On Christmas Eve, for once, she let him have it. Nathan took Margot in his arms (she had been sleeping on the sofa for the past hour), and carried her through the house and out the backdoor, backing out carefully so the screen door didn’t wake her, and then walking across the patio—Liesel had draped white blankets over the potted plants, there was going to be a freeze, they looked like furniture in a house shut up for the season—to the apartment where they all slept. She woke up anyway when he pulled at the sliding door, so he set her down (“It’s cold, it’s cold,” she said, meaning her feet on the concrete), and since she was up, he made her change into pajamas and brush her teeth and pee before crawling into bed. Then he sat next to her on the mattress on the floor in the shadow of the pool table, not thinking much, until she was gonzo, but at the same time realizing that some decision he had been putting off had somehow been made.

  Clémence went into the kitchen to finish the dishes, and when Jean joined her and offered to help, she said, “That’s all right, you did all the cooking. The truth is, I kind of like … making everything … cleaning up,” and Jean, feeling a little as if she had been turned away, turned away. While Clémence, in Liesel’s apron, soaked the plates. She didn’t think there was enough there, in the story about the lights on 37th Street, because … there were too many things going on. The couple who started the whole thing moved out about six years ago, though maybe it would be worth tracking them down. One of the landlords who owned three houses on the block had been holding out for ridiculous rents, which left them unoccupied. But the thing she was trying to get across would be hard to pin down, the way neighbors used to come and go but whoever came in somehow … there was continuity, they worked together on something, even when they didn’t always get along, whereas now … some part of the natural process had broken down. Several of the houses were rented out to students, who had become much more conventional, but she was also thinking about Paul, who seemed a little quiet all night, and imagined him driving back along the empty roads to an empty house.

  Her relationship with him had always been … in some ways he was very like Nathan, but easier, the kid-brother version, so that she could … also, she had never really trusted Dana, who struck her as a slightly below-room-temperature human being, though at the same time it took guts to come here, at Christmas, and stay here while … She had said to Nathan that afternoon, it can’t be easy on Paul either. And he looked at her surprised. It’s funny sometimes the things brothers don’t think about each other. He can come and go whenever he wants, and she said, but she’s always here and he isn’t. She has Cal.

  Jean went to check on the fire before going to bed, and saw that Liesel was still up, sitting at her desk a
nd peering, tapping at her computer in the study next door. So she went in to say good night, it was only eleven o’clock, but she had been moving through fogs of jet lag all night, in and out, though now felt mildly alert.

  “You should go to bed, too,” she said, and Liesel looked up at her.

  “I wonder why Bill didn’t call. But it’s too late now, isn’t it.”

  “I think so. He’ll call tomorrow.”

  “I heard Paul say to Dana, why don’t you come with Cal one night and sleep at the house.”

  “He wouldn’t say that.”

  “I heard it,” Liesel said. With her brown wrinkled face and gray hair, she was still capable of childish expressions of pleasure.

  “What did Dana say?”

  “I don’t know. But she didn’t say no.”

  “I don’t think they’re getting back together.”

  “Why not? Why would she come here otherwise?”

  “Because you invited her.”

  “I invited her because I didn’t think she would come. She’s a very … I think she’s essentially a very lonely person.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Mom.”

  “She’s the kind of person whose parents go on cruises, when their daughter––”

  “I’m sure they asked her to come.”

  “She lives alone with a small child. She can’t go out unless she gets a babysitter.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I want you to remember that this was my idea. Inviting her here … this was my idea.”

  “Nobody else is going to claim it,” Jean said. But she didn’t feel like joking and also thought, I need to tell her what Dana told me, that she’s seeing somebody else. But she didn’t tell her, she stood looking at her mother in the glow of the desk lamp (the room was otherwise dark), and said, “You should go to bed, too.”

  “I want to talk to Bill. He thought I was crazy, too. I want to tell him what happened.”

  “Nothing happened,” Jean said, feeling suddenly tired and unhappy. “It’s an hour later in New York, everybody’s asleep. I’m going to sleep.” And then, after a moment, when Liesel didn’t answer, Jean added, “It was a nice Christmas. Everybody was well-behaved.” She put her hand on her mother’s shoulder and rubbed it a little, between the neck and the shoulder blade. Her mother’s back was always like a piece of wood.

  “It was a nice Christmas,” Liesel repeated.

  *

  On the drive home, Paul thought about Marcello, his first agent and coach, who had died a little over a year ago. A few nights before, Paul woke up from a dream, thinking, I owe him a phone call—because they hadn’t spoken in a while. But what he felt when he remembered wasn’t particularly sad, it was nice to think that your subconscious at least didn’t pay much attention to death. Marcello had always been a phone-caller, not an emailer; he never learned to use a computer. But even after their formal relationship ended (Marcello had semiretired, and looked after only his big-name clients, which didn’t include Paul—one of his former assistants had started his own agency, and they represented him), once every few months the phone would ring, and when you picked up, Marcello’s voice on the other end would say, “Well?” Because Paul had won a match the night before, or maybe because he had lost.

  It was Marcello who first suggested that Paul could make a living as a professional, after he saw him play at the UT summer camp. He had flown in to give a talk, and watch the kids play a tournament, and hand out the trophy at the end—a short fat slightly implausible figure, like the Wizard of Oz, stepping out from behind the curtain. Paul finished runner-up, and Marcello gave him his card and told him (Paul was thirteen years old) that his parents should call him. So Bill called, and after that they began a kind of relationship—whenever he came to Austin he had dinner at their house. Because to Liesel’s great surprise she liked him (he always brought a bottle of Cortese di Gavi, my native wine, he said, and dressed like a professor, in slacks and cashmere), even though she didn’t like what he was trying to do to her son: persuade him to become a tennis player.

  For a year it seemed every night the family had some kind of argument about whether or not Paul should move to Bradenton. There was an academy there, run by the agency Marcello worked for. Even Nathan weighed in. But Liesel eventually got her way, partly because, the truth is, Paul didn’t fight hard enough. Marcello flew with him down to Bradenton one weekend (he was fourteen at the time) to play in their spring break tournament, and for three nights he slept at the facility with all the other kids—most of them boarders, who went to high school at the academy, too, and had homework and curfews and guidance counselors to deal with. Paul, shy, younger than most, still coming to terms with puberty, had never been so miserable in his life. A whole world of people like him, healthy, sun-browned, relentlessly competitive, whereas before, in his Austin life … Most of them knew each other, too, they knew the same coaches and sponsors, and the games they played, the arguments they got into, had a ritual element that was very hard for an outsider to participate in. But he didn’t want to participate. He wanted to run away. Because eventually you always lose, somebody is always better—probably somebody you don’t like much, because when you’re better you show it, you talk about it, and so everybody there had to put up with the constant sense of being measured, and not just measured, but valued, according to how hard he could hit a topspin forehand or …

  He reached the third round before losing to a kid from Philadelphia, whose mother sat in the stands (there were only two or three rows of bleachers on court), and shouted Jam him, jam him, before every second serve. No mercy, that was something else she called out … no mercy, when the kid put away a volley at the net, and Paul could imagine Liesel listening and shaking her head. She wore Bradenton Tennis Academy gear, a purple fleece, even on a humid afternoon, and from time to time her son looked over at her with an expression on his face that Paul couldn’t read. Of dependence or annoyance or something else. But you’re not supposed to notice these things, and afterward, after he lost, he could tell that Marcello had been disappointed—that he had expected him to do better. This was extraordinarily painful to realize. On Sunday night, Marcello drove him to the airport. He said, “Talk to your mother about it, if it’s what you want.” Somehow that “if” seemed a new development, too. It had never seemed in question before. “I’ll call her on Monday,” Marcello promised. It was the first time Paul had flown alone. Bill picked him up at the other end, and even though he was deeply relieved, even happy, to be among family again, Paul hardly said a word on the drive home. He didn’t want to disappoint his father, too.

  Somehow after that weekend the conversation about sending him to Florida lost its urgency, and he wondered if Marcello might have said something to his mother. Even now, twenty years later, Paul remembered one of the shots he missed against that kid from Philadelphia. After working him from side to side, he tried to put away a cross-court forehand that caught the tape and rolled back. Break point against; shortly after, he lost the first set. Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep things like this came back to him, he had to watch it all again. In the last match of his career, against Borisov at the US Open … but also the way Willy called him Uncle Paul, Uncle Paul, while Cal slept on Dana’s lap … He was passing Dripping Springs, and entering again the deep wide Texas dark, out on Route 12, past Driftwood, before the lights of Wimberley appeared, such as they were. There’s a case you can make, there’s a case you have to make against her, to her … It’s possible to live a different kind of life, with the kids, especially when they’re kids … because they don’t … they don’t care about anything, apart from what we teach them to care about.

  After a tough first set, where he couldn’t get his rally shots deep enough and Borisov used the angles and even started coming to net, he managed to stay on serve in the second, and pulled out the tiebreak, too, when Borisov had a run of overhitting his forehand, until in the third … at break point
against, and three-all, he hit a drop shot that bounced up, and Borisov, gliding in, whipped it cross court, but Paul had guessed right, he was already moving … and the net was open, all he had to do was … using the pace of the ball … all he had to do was get it over, and down the line, but for some reason he … maybe he jumped on it early, just because he wasn’t expecting it to sit up like that for him … and even a year and a half later had to watch himself dump it into the net, over and over and over again. Even in the fourth set, Paul had his chances, but by that point …

  Sometimes in the middle of a game, you get the feeling that you’re not gonna win, and it’s not even a feeling anymore, it’s like a kind of knowledge, in the same way that, when you are going to win, you know that, too … so that this point or that doesn’t matter much either way, because whatever happens is going to happen. Marcello always told him, You have to fight that feeling, because it’s part of the problem, but you could tell he believed in it, too. Everybody believed in it … partly because it’s the reason … you play, to have some kind of insight into … or feel some kind of relation to … what’s happening to you right now … but he couldn’t tell if, as he crossed the empty riverbed on Red Hawk Road, over the level concrete, and switched on his brights (so that brown grass and juniper seemed to jump out of the night) whether Dana, when he asked her to stay over with Cal, was going to stay or not … or even if it was a good idea or if he wanted her to.