“What’s everybody doing today?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gone downstairs. Willy and Margot have caught Cal’s cold. Dana’s leaving tomorrow.”
“Is Paul around?”
“He usually comes after breakfast.”
But she didn’t tell him about Ben and Julie, or Susie coming to her study late at night. She didn’t want to upset him, and he tended to overreact to childish misbehavior. He thought it was more important than it was.
Dana was making coffee when she came downstairs. She was fiddling with the coffee maker by the sink, dressed in some of the clothes she had arrived in almost a week before: her tweed skirt and red turtleneck, slate-gray tights and the kind of clumpy leather dress shoes Liesel associated with provincial lawyers. She looked like someone who didn’t want to make a mess or get her clothes dirty. Liesel found her as always difficult to read. It seemed early in the morning to be capable of so much self-presentation—a little after eight o’clock. Of course, she wasn’t really at home here, this wasn’t her home. She had to self-present, because Paul wasn’t around to do it for her. But maybe also she was retreating a little, she was getting ready to go.
Liesel said, “Is Cal up? How’s he feeling?”
“He’s up, he’s not only up, he’s running around the yard.”
“It’s cold today. I’ve turned on the heating.”
“I spent most of this morning trying to talk him out of wearing shorts. But I guess he’s got pent-up energy, it’s like he needs to make up for lost time.”
“I like the cold. I’m jealous of Bill—he looks out the window and sees snow.”
This was an odd thing to say, and Liesel knew it. Bill’s sister had died, he was stuck in her old house, making funeral arrangements. But somehow it opened up the conversation, because Dana said, laughing, “Well, I persuaded him to put on a coat. Shorts and a coat. Small victories,” and then she said, “He loves the backyard. In New York we have to—someone has to take him to the park. He’s very happy here. I’m grateful for that.”
“It can’t be easy, leaving him behind.”
“You get used to most things.” But Liesel couldn’t tell if this was a confession or an evasion. Then Dana’s phone rang—it was lying on the breakfast table, and she let it ring.
For the next hour people came in and sat down, they made breakfast and coffee, they cleared their plates and set the table again. Ben had waffles. Cal clattered in and ate a second breakfast—he had waffles, too. Clémence walked in the backdoor, in a pantsuit, ready for work. Margot was still asleep; she’d had a bad night. Her fever spiked at two or three a.m. She was very worried about something, she kept saying, Nobody has my shoes. But she was sleeping now so they were letting her sleep. Nathan wanted to get a little work done, he was giving that talk at the law school in a few days. Maybe he was sleeping, too. Julie was … Julie had discovered the bathroom. I don’t know what she does in it—she reads, she takes her iPad in there. God knows when she’s coming out.
Henrik and Jean eventually appeared. Jean was still in her pajamas, Henrik had showered and dressed. His clean bald head had little indentations. He was very undemanding. Liesel offered him lukewarm filter coffee, which had been sitting in the pot for an hour, and he said thank you, even when David proposed to bring back drinks and pastries from the food truck at the back of the Spider House. So David went out into the cold—it was a different kind of cold from previous mornings, thicker or deeper, north-flavored, the real thing—and everybody sat around making plans for the day, or talking about plans. You have to go through all of the options, Jean said, and after that you have to wait for Nathan to decide.
His wife made a face at her.
The doorbell rang and Liesel went to open the door. A pale young man in a pale cashmere sweater and pink collared shirt stood outside.
“Is Clémence around?” he asked. “I’m supposed to pick her up.”
So Kurt came in, was offered coffee, politely declined, and waited around embarrassed for a few minutes, leaning against the kitchen counter, while Clémence went out to tell Nathan she was going. Jean said, “I’ve been thinking about it. Roy Scheider’s an idiot. The Deer Hunter’s a pretty good movie.”
“The first half is,” David said.
Liesel thought, I don’t understand anything that’s going on. But in a few more days everybody would be gone, the house would be quiet again, and all of this activity or inactivity and the complicated relationships that produced it would happen offstage or be suspended entirely until they met up again next Christmas. In a few more days, she’d sit down to breakfast alone, unless Bill would sit with her, which he sometimes did.
*
Dana didn’t check her messages till after the table was cleared and the boys were watching TV. She watched them watching from the doorway and listened to her voicemail. Stephen had called from Manhattan. His daughter and her husband and the new baby were staying with him for a couple of nights—they had driven down from Connecticut together.
“Hi,” he said, “hey. Listen,” but there were noises off and he seemed to be walking or shifting the phone around because a few seconds later he continued, in a slightly different voice. “I miss you. I’ve been thinking of you. I’ve been thinking generally, and feel like there are certain things we should probably clear up. Because I’m not completely sure where we are right now, or what we’re doing.” He laughed. “All right, all right, just say it. I want you to know that whatever your hesitations might be—and there may be many—I don’t want you to think that having more babies should be one of them. This may be totally premature but I want you to know that’s not an issue for me. I’m happy to go through it all again.” There was a pause and he said, “Feel free to ignore any of the above. Give me a call … or not. Merry Christmas,” and hung up.
She didn’t want to call him back in front of the kids, so she wandered down the hall and into the living room but Liesel was in her study. She could phone him from the porch but it was really too cold, and she might have felt exposed in other ways—anybody could see her talking. So she went upstairs, into her room, and closed the door and sat on her bed. For a second while listening to his message she thought that Stephen was trying to break it off, and she had this physical reaction, which surprised her, so part of what she felt afterward was just relief. She called his home number and he picked up almost immediately.
“Hey, I’m glad you called. I didn’t think you would, I couldn’t tell how crazy I sounded.”
“You didn’t sound crazy.”
“They’ve gone out, they’re taking the baby for a walk.” Alexis, his daughter, had always been vaguely friendly with Dana. If they ran into each other at a party, both of them said, let’s get together and meant it but not enough afterward to make the effort. Then she married and got pregnant and her husband took a job in D.C. “The thing is,” Stephen said, “I like her husband, I like him fine, he’s a good guy, he appreciates her, but when he’s around it’s like, there’s this kind of dust or Teflon coating on my daughter. It’s like she’s wearing this weird veil of pleasantness. I can’t get through and I start to feel … it’s kind of this intense kind of loneliness, because even though it’s my apartment, the family unit is really her and her husband, and this baby, and I’m just … I’m a ghost, I’m a piece of furniture. Every night they go to bed around nine o’clock and retreat into their bedroom, or whatever, and I just hang around watching TV or something. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of time to think.”
“I don’t feel like I get any. There are always all these people around. Everybody wants to know your opinion, and if you don’t have an opinion …”
“About what?”
“About anything, it doesn’t matter. You never know what it’s going to be.”
She could see the driveway from where she was sitting. (In the morning, when Cal woke up, she had louvered the blinds to let in the light.) Cold white skies, cold white light, and Paul was parking his car against t
he curb. He got out and walked through the grass to the steps, an image broken into slats or lines, and then under the portico and out of sight. She could hear the front door while Stephen was talking.
“So yesterday we finally had a fight. The whole Christmas thing in Connecticut was basically just a lot of bullshit politeness. I said, what do you want from me. I’m hanging around the whole time, you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want to do anything, I’m starting to go crazy. I don’t even think you want to be in the same room, and she said, Help, I want help, and I said, Tell me what to do. I’m not your mother, you have to tell me. So today this morning at five a.m. when the baby woke up she brought her into my room. She said, your turn, and I took her into the den, and for the next … I don’t even know how long it was. Eventually she got hungry and there was nothing I could do. But for a couple of hours … we danced, we sat on the couch, we watched TV, this little warm thing, and I thought, it suddenly occurred to me, I can do this. If that’s the problem, I can do this again. I just wanted to call you … I wanted to talk.”
“I want to see you, too,” she said. Paul had walked in the door, she could hear it slam. The entrance hall was directly below her.
“Let’s make a date. What are you doing New Year’s Eve? I’ve been invited to this thing at Ted Greenberg’s apartment—not by Ted, I should say. But we don’t have to go, we could do anything.”
“I want to see you before that,” Dana said. “I’m flying tomorrow.”
“My daughter is going the day after.” Then he said, “Maybe we can all hang out.”
“You don’t have to … that’s fine. I can wait, it’s just that … Cal is staying here. Paul’s going to bring him back next week. Twenty-four hours before I have to say goodbye, I start to get a little emotional. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, that’s all right. That’s all right.”
“He’s very happy here, he’s fine.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Listen, I should probably go. Everybody’s … they all sit around all day making plans. I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“We’ll do something fun, just the two of us. Okay? New Year’s Eve—I’ll book something, let me surprise you.”
“Okay,” she said, and hung up.
The green-tiled bathroom at the end of the hall was unoccupied. She washed her face and stared at it for a minute then went downstairs to find Paul or Cal. Susie said they were in the backyard, so Dana walked out, into the cold, letting the screen door bang behind her. It had rained overnight, the sharp grass showed every drop, and her Foxley loafers lifted at the back with each step. She had bought them on sale a few months ago. They were a little too big, and she could feel her tights growing damp at the heel; but that didn’t matter, it’s what she deserved.
She found them playing tennis, taking turns knocking a ball against the concrete wall. Cal was still in his shorts, his coat lay on the ground. Paul saw her. He said, “I tried to make him keep it on.”
“It’s nice to see him running around.”
“Come on,” Cal said, so Paul hit him the ball.
“Is he any good?” Dana asked.
“I think he likes it. He saw Willy doing it so he wants to do it, too. Half the talent is having fun.”
“Is that what you’re good at?” But she was only kidding.
A few minutes later, they walked back in together. Paul was getting cold and there were puddles all over the court. Whenever the ball landed in one, it became heavy and dirty and started spraying on contact. A very thin film of mold or moss grew in the cracks of the painted concrete and turned slimy in the rain. Anyway, he was worried that Cal might slip; he wanted to talk to Dana. Cal ran inside. There were stepping-stones between the fountain and the backdoor patio, and Cal tried to touch each one. Paul carried his coat.
Dana said, “I want to talk to you before I go. I want to have an actual conversation.”
“I want to have a conversation, too. Why don’t you stay over in Wimberley tonight? I can drive you to the airport in the morning. Cal’s going to have to move anyway. It might make it easier for him.”
When she didn’t answer, he said, “It doesn’t matter. I’d like it, too.”
“Okay,” she said.
* * *
Clémence hated driving and relied on taxis or the kindness of colleagues or friends to get anywhere. She was used to accepting rides; it didn’t really bother her that Kurt maybe had a slight crush. At her age, she knew how to turn this kind of relationship into something maternal—that was probably a high percentage of what was going on anyway. Kurt was a young ambitious guy. You forget when you’re married with kids how much time a guy like that spends alone, you can’t even really imagine it. They feel awkward around women, and that awkwardness comes across as something else, sexual hesitancy or interest. Anyway, it probably didn’t have much to do with her.
Kurt drove a Saab 9-3; it looked new. He must have parents with money. The small backseat was taken up with equipment: black cases and leather bags, things with metal legs. He had stopped off at KUT on the way over. When they got in the car, he said, “That’s a nice house your husband grew up in.”
“It’s a nice neighborhood.” This is how she deflected him.
But it’s true, every second morning she went for a run before breakfast and took pleasure from the quiet streets. All the houses looked different, people cared about their gardens. You got a mix of income brackets, too. There were red-brick neo-Georgians with thirty-foot pillars guarding the front door, houses that basically looked like small-town banks. But you also saw white-walled bungalows, witches’ cottages, whose chimney stacks were hidden by ivy; bamboo covered the windows. Red brick, yellow brick, painted clapboard … Craftsman-style homes from the Thirties, Colonials (like the Essingers’) from the Twenties, modernist rebuilds in the new Austin vernacular—brightly painted boxes with pre-rusted metal towers rising out of them.
The park with the creek running through it was really just a grassy field; the footpath on one side was lined with old pecans. Most of the streets had sidewalks and were wide enough anyway for kids to play football in them or ride their bikes.
Variety and modesty and comfort, neighborliness and individualism—this is what it suggested, old American virtues, though in fact the Austin that Nathan felt nostalgic about existed only in pockets like Hemphill Park. Even here the people who could afford to buy or rent now were lawyers and tech types, businessmen. The high-school history teachers and part-time musicians had been priced out. When Dodie died, they’d tear down her house and build a new one.
Kurt was happy to talk about Austin, too. It seemed like moving here involved a certain amount of self-consciousness. Pretty much everyone he knew came from out of town, places like Richmond or Denver or Brooklyn or Palo Alto. It didn’t even matter anymore. The city was changing so fast that the restaurants and bars and music joints you wanted to go to, even some of the parks and neighborhoods, probably weren’t around five years ago. There was no real advantage to being native. He had done some prep work yesterday, talking to Joel Beigott on the phone, just to see what he wanted to say. Joel said, it used to be that the way you could recognize a real Austinite is they knew the shortcuts and places to eat and now you can recognize them because they don’t.
They crossed over North Lamar into Pemberton Heights, then swung onto Mopac and headed downtown. The shiny new skyline spread out along the river to the south; even on a cold day, with low cloud cover, the Frost Tower gleamed like brass. One of the advantages of not driving is that you can stare out the window.
But she was also thinking, Nathan has ambivalent feelings about going home, which often, in one way or another, I have to deal with. They’d had a fight or muted argument before breakfast. Julie was moping around, lying in bed and then wasting time in the bathroom, refusing to get dressed. Nathan eventually lost patience.
“Snap out of it,” he said. “Nothing happened.”
A
ll of this took place in the dark of the back apartment, around the pool table, on the brown linoleum floors, with the bathroom fan humming in the background, and Margot lying feverish in bed.
“I thought you were on my side.” Julie looked genuinely surprised.
“What Ben did was not forgivable, but it was also not a big deal.”
“Not forgivable is too strong,” Clémence said.
“You don’t forgive someone who picks wings off ants. You don’t punish them, but you stay out of their way.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened, Julie is …”
“I’m not some helpless …” Julie broke in.
“It was an analogy. I’m talking about the intention, I’m talking about the pleasure.”
“I can look after myself.”
“Then do it,” Nathan told her.
Afterward Clémence tried to reason with him, or soften him up. “You’re too absolute in these things.” And then, uncomfortably echoing what David had said to her: “He just wanted attention. They’re moving to England and he feels out of control.”
“Excuse me, this is not a cry for help. It’s something deliberate, it’s weird.”
The argument didn’t matter much, except that it touched on a deeper disagreement between them, that he was intractable. So he gave in to her sometimes, to show he could give in. He had promised already to say nothing to Ben, but it made him resentful—of her. And Julie was still mad at her father. She felt like, you didn’t stand up for me. For some reason she thought of it as his responsibility. So the wheel went round.
Meanwhile Clémence couldn’t help noticing at breakfast that Susie and Ben … he sat next to his mother, there was a tone in his voice. When he asked to be excused he glanced at her; she let him watch TV. He looked chastened, which was a good thing, but it also meant that by crawling out of bed at two in the morning to throw stones at the window where her daughter was sleeping (and scaring the shit out of her), he got out of his system whatever spirit of protest or rebellion had made him do it. And afterward there was tenderness and reconciliation, there was forgiveness, while for Julie … But you can’t get involved in this kind of thing. You have to be the one who doesn’t get involved.
Christmas in Austin Page 38
