“We were talking all the time, we were getting along. I thought we were getting along.”
“Has Jean said anything to you?”
“About what?”
“She said she’s seeing someone in New York.”
“Who said?”
“Dana, this is what she told Jean. We assumed you knew.”
“No,” Paul said. “I didn’t know.”
“I mean, what do you want out of all this? Do you want her back?”
“I never … I wanted to get out of New York. I wanted to live a different life. I’d be happy for her to be a part of it.”
“I don’t think that … I’m not sure that’s going to sell it to her.”
“I shouldn’t have to sell it.” Then he said, “I didn’t sleep much last night. I can’t think straight.”
They had reached the end of the park and Susie asked, “Do you want to keep going or do you want to turn around?”
“Maybe we should go back. I don’t like leaving Cal.”
Some of the houses they still had associations with, but many of them had been rebuilt or spruced up, repainted. The front yards looked different. When they were kids, nobody cared much about their yards—or at least, they didn’t notice. Now it all looked like real estate. Susie wanted to say something comforting but she didn’t know what. Paul when he was unhappy went inward; you had to throw down a line. Or just leave him alone, but when you see someone for one week a year, that doesn’t work anymore. She felt, both of them have reasons to feel what they’re feeling or to act the way they’re acting, they should be able to see that.
Paul said, “Marcello advised me once, if you make some money, buy a house in the country, pay off the mortgage, put it in your name. Even if you get married. So afterward if anything happens, if you get divorced, you have something permanent in your life, that’s always there, which you can go to. Even if your kids start to hate you, it’s there. When he said this to me, I thought, these are the sorts of people he usually deals with, people for whom this is good advice.”
“You are not those people.”
“Well, at least I have a house.”
“Nobody hates you.”
“I don’t understand how Nathan can get in a car and drive for an hour instead of calling me. I don’t understand how he can know me and do that.”
“He wasn’t thinking of you, he was responding to Dana. He was trying to behave honorably.”
“We don’t have to go over all that again,” Paul said.
When they got home, he helped Susie carry the stroller up the steps. May was still asleep, and they left her in the front hall. Then Paul went to look for his mother—she was in her study. He knocked because the glass door was closed, then he slid it open and went in.
“So did that turn out how you planned?” he said, joking, or pretending to joke.
“I didn’t plan anything!” Her emotional response was instantaneous.
“How long did you know she was seeing somebody in New York? Did everybody know? Was anybody going to tell me?”
“Mensch du, we didn’t know—nobody knew.” Sometimes when Liesel was upset she sounded outraged.
“Jean knew, Nathan knew, Susie knew.”
“She told us last night, we only just found out.” Then she said, “Don’t be angry with Jean. She thought you knew anyway, she didn’t want to interfere.”
“I’m not angry with Jean, I’m angry with you.”
“I messed up.”
“What did you think would happen when you invited her?” But he heard himself shouting and tried to keep his voice down. “What am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to go back to?”
“You don’t have to go back anywhere.”
“I can’t stay here,” he said.
“Why not? You can sleep in Dana’s room. I just have to change the sheets.”
“Don’t treat me like a kid,” he said.
As he walked out again, Liesel thought of Klaus, her brother, who had the same narrow boyish face and dark complexion. Sitting in his apartment, half-deaf, getting angry on the phone. She used to say that Paul was her happiest child, he didn’t have to work at it. Just give him a ball. Bill said the same thing. He’s happy hitting that ball against the wall—by the hour, Bill said. He’s got this endless patience for playing by himself, but now he was thirty-five years old and this kind of patience didn’t help him, it was part of the problem.
Nathan ran into him in the hallway by the stairs. He said, “I’ve been trying to find you, I want to say something,” but Paul wouldn’t stop or look at him.
* * *
When Dana took off from Austin, Bill was on the runway at JFK. They passed each other midair somewhere over Tennessee. Since seven in the morning, he had been cleaning up the house—Judith helped. They filled garbage bags with food and napkins and paper cups, they vacuumed the living-room carpet and mopped the kitchen floor, they emptied the fridge, because who knows when they were coming back. At some point they had to instruct a realtor but maybe they could send the keys. There were still a lot of decisions to get through first. He unplugged the fridge and opened the doors and rolled a towel against the bottom on the linoleum tiles. He didn’t like throwing out good food and ate some of it as he went along—babka from Polanka’s and dry challah and bagel halves with a little cream cheese. He said to Judith, “Should I make you something for the plane?” but she was sick of all this food, she wanted to wash her hands of it.
“I’ll eat at the airport, I don’t like eating in the air.”
If Bill ate a big breakfast, he skipped lunch. He could eat again when he got to Austin.
For some reason, they had run out of conversation. Judith was preparing herself already, she had to go home. She had to be a mother again and deal with her soon-to-be ex-husband and in-laws, she had to get used to being a grown-up and making a hundred daily decisions for herself. So she was perfectly friendly but held back. Their strange five-day intimacy, which was partly inherited from Rose, by shared grief and the roles that were sanctioned by it, by living in her house, attending her at the hospital, dealing with her funeral, was over. Their lives wouldn’t really have much to do with each other anymore; they didn’t really know each other that well. What Judith had to go back to, as a single mother, living in Chicago, accepting the support of her girlfriends, complaining about the things you complain about, this was not within the range of his experience. And his life to her must seem equally incomprehensible. The way he conducted his relationship with his kids, with Liesel, his frustrations with the university, the pleasure he took in his house, the Texas weather, all of this was foreign to her, too.
Even in the car, on the way to the airport, they didn’t talk much. The roads were clearer but there was still a lot of Christmas traffic, even at lunchtime. She was flying Delta, terminal four; his flight left out of terminal eight. He dropped her off first, because she always worried about missing flights. They had plenty of time but Judith had reached the point where any task or diversion that stood even symbolically between her and the moment she would see her son stressed her out. And by that point Bill was perfectly happy to be on his own. So he pulled over at the curb, got out, carried her bags to the sidewalk, gave her a hug and said, “If you ever need anything, give me a call. I’m talking about money, too. We’ll be in touch about other things as well. Okay,” he said, and she said, “Goodbye, Uncle Bill.” Then he drove around looking for the rental car drop-off. It was a relief to get rid of the key.
Only after collecting his ticket and passing through security—everywhere you go, you wait in lines, you have your hands full, you unzip, unbelt, take out your documents and put them back again, take off your jacket and put it on again, zip up, belt up, move along—when he was sitting in his aisle seat on the plane could he relax enough to think or feel. What a week; at least it was over; you don’t have to live through a week like that again. You don’t have to live through it again because Rose is dead. The life tha
t had been made for him was gone, his childhood, the house he grew up in, they were buried with his sister. All that was left was the life he had made for himself. For the journey, he had brought along one of her novels, a Lee Child thriller. He read it and sometimes stopped reading and looked out at the blue winter afternoon sky, and the clouds below it, then turned back to the book. It mostly held his attention. The flight was a long flight, over four hours, but there was nothing else to do—nothing he had to do, nobody needed him, nobody could reach him. Nathan was picking him up.
About the Author
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He is the author of seven previous novels, including You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the 2015 James Tait Black Prize. He has written essays, stories, poetry and reviews for the Guardian, Granta, the Paris Review and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2013, Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
By the Same Author
The Syme Papers
Either Side of Winter
Playing Days
Imposture
A Quiet Adjustment
Childish Loves
You Don’t Have to Live Like This
A Weekend in New York
Copyright
First published in the UK and the USA in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Benjamin Markovits, 2019
Cover design by Faber
Author photograph © Caroline Maclean
The right of Benjamin Markovits to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–33977–8
Christmas in Austin Page 44
