To Be a Man

by Nicole Krauss

  “Hi,” I said into the flannel of his shirt.

  “I was worried,” said Victor. “I tried to call you at the museum to come home early.”

  “Why? Was there more news? Why didn’t you call my cell phone?”

  I’d had the phone since a month after 9/11; my father had insisted. But he and my mother were the only ones who called me on it. Victor did not yet believe in being reached.

  “No. They’re giving instructions on how to seal the windows with duct tape, but they’re not saying why. I went to the supermarket.”

  We both looked around the kitchen at the bags of apricots and pears, the cheese wrapped in butcher paper, the loaves of bread, the chocolate bars and pints of ice cream, the cold cuts and condiments, the plastic tubs of dips and spreads.

  “I can see.”

  “The store was being emptied. I grabbed what I could,” Victor said. “I’m going to make you dinner,” he said, nipping my ear between his lips.

  Victor is a talented cook, and in the ten minutes it took me to change into my sweatpants and curl up on the sofa in front of the TV, the apartment was already filled with the smell of something good simmering on the stove. I watched as the news channel flashed images of ransacked shelves at the supermarkets and lines snaking out onto the street outside the distribution centers, and then the picture cut to a little girl with blond curls and a nose crusted with snot trying to work a gas mask down over her face. When I looked up from the TV screen I caught a reflection of myself in the window, tucked under a blanket like a child before a hurricane, and I realized that I was full of happy anticipation. Outside the world was cold and dark, but inside the rooms were lit with the yellow glow of lamps, and, waiting for Victor to call me for dinner, I felt the rush of pleasure that I used to seek in the made-up games of my childhood, where all things were eclipsed by the singular goal of survival.

  Victor must have felt it too, because despite the grim uncertainty of the news and the future threat of scarcity, the meal he’d prepared was a feast. We ate Japanese style, sitting on cushions around the coffee table, the television turned down low behind us. There was duck cooked with apricots and raspberries, and salad with pomegranate seeds. He turned off the lights, lit candles, and opened a bottle of wine from the region where his family comes from in Languedoc. I told him about the scene at the distribution center. He stopped eating and stared at me the way he used to when I was a student and would sit in his office scratching my bare knees. In the middle of a sentence he leaned across the corner of the table and kissed me. His tongue was in my mouth, and he slipped his hand under my bra. When I pushed my hand against the hardness under his jeans, he groaned and rolled on top of me. He unbuckled his belt, and I inhaled sharply when he pulled off my pants and I felt him against my stomach, felt my spine crack, and my ribs pressing into the floorboards.

  We ate dessert flushed and damp with sweat. It had been a long time since we’d done something like that. Despite Victor’s interest in the passion of the Middle Ages, his campaign in favor of friction and conflict, even he would have to admit that our own relationship was closer to the stable average of which he was so critical. We’d been living together for five years, and our days and nights had taken on a certain familiar order dictated by my hours at the museum and Victor’s at the university, and the great, silent country of hours that Victor spent at work in his study.

  The candles were burning deep, their centers already liquid. Victor shared out what was left of the wine into our glasses, and even though I was already feeling a little drunk, I swallowed mine down in a couple of gulps. We turned up the news again and listened, but there wasn’t any new information, just the same images, over and over, of people trying on gas masks and walking around with them as if they were testing the feel of new shoes. Neither of us was tired, or maybe we didn’t want the evening to end, didn’t want to go to sleep and wake up to whatever the world would bring us tomorrow, so we decided to play a game of Scrabble. Victor is obsessed with the game and must know every three-letter word in the language. It helps that his English is impeccable. My ear is so used to his accent that there are times when I almost forget that most of Victor’s life took place in another idiom, with different expressions for pleasure and pain, in sentences to me foreign and incomprehensible. Sometimes I come across Victor exclaiming aloud to himself in French, and I am reminded of this other life, for a moment thrown off guard, and forced to add a third, secret Victor to the Victors I already know.

  While Victor went to get the Scrabble board I cleared our plates, piling them in the sink with the dirty pots and pans in which the remains of our dinner were already congealing. The sight of them gave me a vague nauseated feeling. On the way back to the living room I passed the boxes with our gas masks where I’d left them sitting by the door. I picked them up and carried them over to the sofa, one under each arm, and while Victor was setting up the board I opened them. I pulled one out of the wrapping, and the instructions fluttered to the floor.

  “Look,” I said, holding it up. It was the kind Victor had asked for, the basic kind everyone was getting with large round eyeholes and a short trunk over the mouth.

  “Let me see.” Victor turned it over in his hands and examined it. He pulled the bands back and slipped it over his face, then turned and regarded me calmly through the clear plastic lenses. He looked ugly and menacing, a strange creature I’d never seen before who was Victor nonetheless, and I felt a flash of anger rise to my cheeks. Without thinking, I leaned forward and blasted each eyehole with a shot of breath, fogging his view. For a moment neither of us moved. Victor continued to sit in silence, and I watched as the clouds of breath slowly evaporated, revealing his distant, dull pupils. Then, at last, when his view had cleared entirely, he winked.

  “Take it off,” I demanded. Victor was motionless, as if the mask had made him demented. “Take it off.” My heart was beating fast. I felt a fierce urge to kick him, but I was sitting down. Before I could do anything, he slipped it off his face and laid it on the floor.

  “It stinks of rubber,” he said. Then he went about choosing his seven letters. I watched his face in silence, surprised at myself.

  Victor put down lemur for the first word, to which I added nut, and then Victor did geek and I did guns. Everything was fine for a while, the little crux of wooden letters expanding like some kind of self-multiplying message, garbled at first but, if you looked carefully enough using the right decoder, possessing its own intelligence, its subtle eloquence, neck sprouting from geek and lick from neck like some kind of confused desire trapped in the language with nothing to do but try desperately to spell its want. Maybe it was just the wine, but as we played I started to think that if we tried hard enough, we could figure out what it was that we were trying to say to each other after all these years, after all the pages read and the meals eaten and the silences kept, and then he put down positron, and all of a sudden I realized that I wanted to tell Victor that I was thinking of leaving him.

  Victor won, as he often does, and as he was dumping the letters back into the drawstring pouch, I began to cry. At first Victor didn’t notice, but at last he glanced up, and a look of surprise crossed his face.

  “It’s only a game,” he joked.

  I tried to smile and shook my head. I wanted to tell him about what I’d realized about the Arbus photographs, about the old woman in a wheelchair who lifted a witch’s mask to her face when the shutter clicked, maybe to protect herself from the photographer’s acute gaze, or send back to Arbus an image of herself, or to throw a wrench into the eternal chain of reflections between two people who gaze upon each other and see, in the stranger looking back, a startling image of themselves. But I said nothing. Victor kneeled in front of me and wiped a tear from my cheek.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m scared,” I whispered.

  “It happens,” Victor said, taking me in his arms, and yet unwilling, even for a moment, to be anything but pragmatic. “A necessary
scourge, natural or man-made, that comes through periodically to control the population.”

  I looked up at him. I knew he thought that I was frightened of whatever it was that we were waiting to hear news of, the thing that might threaten the very air we breathed and the life we’d grown used to. And maybe I was. Or maybe I was just tired and drunk, fed up with the argument in my head—for or against a life with Victor—that all this time later was still unclear. It was already midnight. The glasses smeared with fingerprints were still on the table, holding the last drops of wine from the place Victor might have come from had his father not moved to Paris to become a doctor, beginning the chain of events that would lead to Victor’s childhood spent in the shadow of L’Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, his youthful interest in plagues and infectious diseases, his passion for the Middle Ages, his teaching job in America, and, finally, me. One of the candles sputtered and went out, and Victor leaned away from me and blew out the other. He lay on the rug and pulled me down next to him, and we held each other in the blue glow of the television.

  And then we fell asleep, sprawled there among the Scrabble letters and the empty wineglasses, and when I woke up again, the sky outside was already starting to lighten. My right hand had fallen asleep, and when I touched it with the fingers of the left the sensation was chilling, like touching the hand of a dead person. I untangled myself from Victor and shook it until the feeling came back. I had a headache, and my mouth was dry, so I got up to get some water from the kitchen. When I came back, the television was mutely flickering, and in its light I saw the gas mask lying on its side by Victor’s face. I picked it up and turned it over, and then I slipped it over my face. It was snug inside, safe like a catcher’s mask, and I lay down on my back, blinking up through the eyeholes. I wondered how long it would be until we knew what it was we were going to need to learn to protect ourselves from, or if it was too late, if the only ones who would survive were those who had been training all the while, with reflective clothing and superior lungs. Maybe whatever it was had already seeped through the cracks of the windows and the door. But I was drowsy, and too tired to object. Without turning to look, I moved my hand until my fingertips touched Victor’s cheek. Then I closed my eyes to wait, grateful for what was left of the dark.

  The next morning was Saturday, and we woke up to the news that the whole thing had been some sort of test. Victor perched on the edge of the couch, his hair sticking up as if he had fought a windstorm to make it through to daybreak. He held the coffee mug between his hands and took little sips, his gaze fixed on the television. After I got out of the shower, I sat down next to him. The mayor was giving a press conference, explaining how they’d wanted to make certain that the city was prepared. We were instructed to keep the masks in a safe and dry place where we would be able to find them easily. He apologized for any inconvenience or unnecessary fright the test had caused anyone, thanked all of the volunteers, and congratulated the city for the admirable way it had performed in test conditions. When the reporters began to bark out questions, I went to the kitchen to pour myself some coffee, and when I switched on the radio, the mayor’s answers echoed through the apartment in an eerie duet.

  It had snowed during the night, which was unusual for that time of year, and Victor and I decided to take a walk together. It had been a long time since we did that, almost as long as since we’d last interrupted dinner to fuck on the living-room floor. It was cold, so we bundled up in hats and scarves, and Victor wore the red wool mittens I’d knitted for him when that was something I did. I wore a pair of gloves that were frayed at the thumbs, and when we stopped to wait for the light to change, Victor lifted my thumb to his mouth like a horn and blew hot air through the hole.

  In the park the snow crunched under our feet. The sun had come out and reflected brightly off everything. Victor made a snowball and threw it at a tree, an explosion of whiteness against the black. I kept slipping because my shoes didn’t have any treads, but Victor held my arm so I wouldn’t fall. There were some kids running around with a dog in the snow, and Victor laughed loudly as he watched.

  I thought about that day some weeks later when I did one of those home tests and found out that I was pregnant. I did it twice because the first time the pink line showed up in the box I couldn’t believe it, even though I’m never late. For a few days I didn’t tell Victor. I went to work and did the tours with the knowledge that in me something tiny was becoming, a kind of human insistence, steadily growing until the day it would finally make its way out into the world to tell us what all this time we had not known, been without, were left wondering. A small being with a clear argument, able to predict the future. Perhaps there was a time during those silent days while I carried around that secret, a small window of opportunity. But it never occurred to me not to keep the baby. During the long months of my pregnancy, before I became too big to walk as far as the park, I often stood outside the fence and watched the runners on the track. I possessed the small, inexplicable hope that if I watched them long enough, the child might be born into their race, with invincible lungs and immunity to whatever it was in the air that drove us to drunkenness and lit the sky at sunset.

  Once, on the way there, I passed someone—it was impossible to tell if it was a man or woman—with a gas mask on. Maybe it was a joke, or maybe the person didn’t trust the mayor, or maybe he or she had simply gotten used to wearing it, had grown to like it in fact, and was reluctant to part with it now and go back to walking around with a naked face, exposed to everything.

  Amour

  I knew her when we were young, and then we lost touch for decades until I saw her again in one of the refugee camps. There are faces suffering can change beyond all recognition. But there are those who possess something, a defining feature maybe, that can’t be altered or deformed, not by time, or displacement, or any variety of pain. Sophie’s eyes were a deep gray that at times, in certain weather, turned almost violet. When I first saw her thin figure in the line that snaked along the chain-link fence, a blue blanket draped over her shoulders, I couldn’t recall her name or even to which of the disjointed epochs of my life she belonged, but I recognized those eyes. Then I heard her voice and I remembered, and for the little while that our paths remained crossed, what I couldn’t remember or never knew, she told me.

  Back then Sophie hadn’t been alone, and despite all the intervening years, with their myriad collapses and disintegrations, I still half expected to see Ezra fly out from the jumble of alleys, bundled in some wretched coat hanging below his knees, wild-bearded, rabbinical and rabid, clutching some loaf or can he’d bartered, or talked his way into, or otherwise Ezra-like negotiated. I’d always liked Sophie, and envied him for having her. And I envied how inevitable their coupling seemed, what a solid fit they made while the rest of us kept coming together and apart, hooking up, falling in love, and then discovering we were only half-baked.

  They’d met in New York toward the very end of the 1990s, but well enough before the actual end that by the time it was nigh, they had plans in place to spend it together, to spend New Year’s snow camping while all the world’s computers glitched, erasing time, rolling us all back to the Stone Age. These two—ever ready for anything, up for anything—would be ready even for this, spooning in their icy white cave or lying just outside it on their backs, in the cupped wings of their own angels, looking up not at the hyperbrilliance of Grucci fireworks but of native stars: stars scattered wild across the universe over Colorado, I think it was, or maybe Wyoming. That neither of them—one raised on the North Shore of Long Island, and the other on an island in South Jersey, both in Congregations Beth Shalom, both in homes kosher but not shomer Shabbat, where being American was an accident of history, English an accident of history, nature an accident of history—that neither of these two had even the faintest notion of how to make a fire, pitch a tent, or waterproof their stuff, let alone survive in subzero temperatures, fazed them not at all, because thus far they had been fantastically
, almost mystically competent, not only in getting into good colleges and making their way in the world but also finding beauty in it. That they broke up for the first time before the end of that long, punishing-to-most-but-not-to-them millennium ever arrived was the reason they didn’t ultimately snow-camp, it should be said: Not because they couldn’t have figured it out. Not because her family, who still made vain gestures of influence, said crazy, said hypothermia. Not because the plane tickets were prohibitively expensive, not to mention all that waterproof gear. Not because either of them stopped believing, even for a second, in the true and the consoling brilliance of those stars.

  They broke up over I don’t know what, and the pain was terrible, unbearable, at least for Sophie. Though for Ezra, too, I have to think, to lose a woman like her. They didn’t have cell phones yet, and the Internet was still dial-up and mostly vacant, and so for a while there was only silence between them, only crying and wondering, not knowing nor being able to know, which is to say: enduring, waiting. The event horizon came and went with each dry, not-freezing, and alone, though at midnight, drunk and feeling ruthless, she turned to the guy who’d been talking her into the wall—me—and kissed him.

  But in late February of that fresh year with all the zeroes, they ran into each other in the line outside Film Forum, and apologies were whispered, and more tears were shed, and her hand slid under his jacket and his flannel shirt to touch his bare, warm skin, and soon enough they were back together again, inhaling each other in the old way, because was there anybody else who could love as big as she could, who was as spirited and as honest, and was there anyone as wickedly funny as he was, as avid, as verbose? Was there anyone else who would go see all those Pasolinis and Fellinis with him, or anyone else who would read to her from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim over the phone, the cordless one cradled hot against her ear, on those nights when he was downtown and she was uptown and couldn’t sleep? That yes, factually, in New York City at the very start of the millennium there were still people who would have done these things, who were doing these things, was irrelevant to their love, just as it was irrelevant, lying anew in each other’s arms, that they’d met one spring afternoon in 1999 purely by chance, and that had they not, each would have eventually fallen for another, which meant that each was replaceable, that each could be replaced. From then on they were solidly together—their coupledom was fixed, became a fixture that the rest of us drank at, envied, aspired to.