by Alice Nelson
Marina made her a cup of tea and Isabel folded her head into her arms on the table and sobbed, her slim shoulders heaving dramatically. Marina had often privately thought that Isabel was too sweet and guileless for Ben, but sorrow had swelled her into someone fiercer than her previous mild self, had given her a new authority, and when she raised her ferocious, wounded face and sat up to drink her tea, Marina couldn’t help feeling faintly afraid of her. She barely dared to put her arm around Isabel.
‘We’re just as baffled as you are,’ Jacob said, pulling up a chair at the table beside the girl. ‘We don’t understand it either.’
This only made Isabel weep again, her face in her hands. She had come to them seeking an answer, some explanation for the swift discarding that had befallen her. She wanted comfort and they could offer none. Marina had looked up at the clock on the wall above Isabel’s head. She had been deep in her work when the girl arrived; for several minutes she had not realised that the doorbell was ringing. A book never exerted a stronger hold on her than when she was wrenched away from it. The beginning of a project was an anxious time for her. There was always the certainty that she would falter. That whatever she wrote would not be enough. She wanted to steal away and return to her work.
‘That’s the worst thing,’ Isabel said at last, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand like a small child. ‘There’s no reason. If there were a reason it would be easier.’
Marina watched the screen of Jacob’s professional self lower across his face, his wise and considered listening posture clicking in despite his own confusion. Sometimes he looked at her like that, his chin resting on his hand. Attentive, interested, all-knowing. How many hours of his life had he spent sitting in hushed rooms listening to people’s private sorrows? Didn’t he grow weary of it, Marina wondered, watching him speak calmly to Isabel. He never complained about his patients as she did about her students. Where did he find the energy to be so endlessly patient? Perhaps that was one of the widest differences between them. Kindness for her was a rush of feeling, impetuous and often unplanned. For Jacob it was something to be carefully dispensed, within reasonable limits. Something sensible and measured.
Isabel left a letter for them to give to Ben. For days it sat on the hall bureau unopened, like a sad remonstration.
‘Write back to her,’ Marina said finally to Ben, handing the letter to him as he left the house one afternoon.
Ben took the letter and stared down at his name on the envelope. Whatever future awaited him was far grander and stranger than one that contained Isabel, Marina thought to herself.
‘What should I say?’ Ben said quietly, looking up at Marina.
‘Something consoling. Tell her that she will always be your first love. Be kind.’
The next morning Ben asked Marina to post the letter he had written to Isabel. She sat at the kitchen table with the envelope in her hand. Ben had printed his name and address carefully on the back. It reminded her of the solemn way that he used to sign all his drawings with his full name as a child. Marina still had a pencil drawing he had made for her of a chemical reaction, appalled by her lack of knowledge in that arena. The combustion of propane and oxygen, resulting in carbon dioxide, water and energy. Every molecule was coloured and named, a flaring yellow sun labelled ‘heat and light!’ to represent energy. At the bottom of the page he had signed ‘from Benjamin M. Kaufman’. The drawing still hung on the wall above her desk.
What had Ben written in the letter to Isabel? The envelope felt very light; there couldn’t be more than two pages inside, possibly only one. Had Ben explained himself to the girl? Was he even capable of wrapping words around what was happening to him? Marina listened for the fall of the letter as she slipped it into the post box.
Three months later, at the end of the spring semester, Marina ran into Isabel’s mother at the Whitney. Marina had taken a group of students there to see the Edward Hopper paintings as part of a new graduate seminar she was teaching on loneliness and the city. They had been reading Simone Weil on the silence of all great painting, the desire to see a landscape as it was when no soul was present in it. No paintings, it seemed to Marina, were more scoured clean of the burden of human presence than Hopper’s cityscapes. Clustered around one of the paintings in the busy gallery, trying to talk loudly enough for the little knot of students to hear her, she had not unfolded her ideas as lucidly as when she was writing notes for the lecture. She could sense a ripple of boredom in the students. It was the last week of classes; they were fractious, distracted. Half of them hadn’t even bothered to come to the museum. She conquered the desire to close her notebook and walk away, walk back across town to her quiet study and her own work. ‘Let’s go and fortify ourselves in the café and continue this discussion,’ she said to them.
Turning from the paintings, Marina had taken a moment to place Isabel’s mother. She stared at the neat blonde hair, the diamond earrings, the expensive handbag. She remembered her, of course, as soon as the woman began to speak.
‘Ben broke her heart. I know, I know – the inflamed passions of the young. But that’s the only way to describe it: heartbreak.’ Isabel’s mother pressed her hand to her heart as if she could feel her daughter’s pain in her own body. She had the same green eyes as Isabel, Marina noticed, a sparkling marine colour.
‘It absolutely destroyed her, the way he cast her off like that,’ her mother said, lowering her voice. ‘She could barely finish the semester. We had to take her to a psychiatrist in the end. She was practically suicidal by the time we got her there. She had to be medicated. The whole thing was terrible for all of us.’
There was a heavy air of reproach in her voice. Ben had harmed her child and she wanted something from Marina. Contrition, an apology.
Marina reached out and touched Isabel’s mother’s slim shoulder. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’
The woman stared down at Marina’s hand. ‘There’s no denying he behaved disgracefully.’
‘No.’
Isabel was much better now, her mother said. She had just left for a study-abroad program in Paris. And she had met a lovely boy, a law student with excellent prospects. A little stab between the ribs, that word ‘prospects’.
Ben’s strange abdication from the world made Marina think of Bartleby in the Herman Melville short story. He had weighed all the possibilities and chosen simply to do nothing. There might be a strange liberation in it, she thought, for this boy who had so far done everything that was expected of him. Perfect grades at Calhoun, chess medals, tennis championships, the scholarship to Brown, plans for a medical degree. He had brought them no trouble. Perhaps there was a radical sort of calm in swerving his life away from its carefully planned course; his other, rejected future unfolding somewhere without him. To decide not to try anymore. There was an odd sense to it in a world so sullied and catastrophic. But he would not discuss any of this with her or Jacob. She had always felt a solitary inner core in Ben, but now he had slipped completely out of their grasp. His misery, whatever its cause, was kept carefully from them.
Sitting beside him on the steps of the brownstone, Marina leaned her shoulder against Ben’s. Once, when he was a little boy with a fever, she had sat up late into the night with him, sliding a cool cloth over his forehead, whispering stories. When he finally fell asleep, a tremble had moved through him, as if he were trying to contain some secret sorrow. Just when she thought she could leave him and return to her own bed, his small hand reached out for hers. Nurses tended sick children in the dormitories on the kibbutz. Marina could not remember a single time that her own mother had sat beside her when she was ill. Her brother, yes, but never her mother.
Ben patted her arm gently, as if she were the one in need of comfort, and rose to his feet. ‘Don’t stay out here too long. You’ll melt,’ he said.
There were so many things she wanted to say to him. Sorrow passes, she would like to say. I know this.
Marina stayed sitting there on the steps after Ben
had disappeared inside the house. An old Mexican man walked past pulling a wooden cart and turned into Mount Morris Park. In the summer the streets were full of these carts selling cups of flavoured shaved ice, soda, candy, husk-wrapped tamales. A grey cat weaved along the fence and dashed across the road. The animal looked terrified, as if it had escaped from a wholesome and clean place into this chaotic and improbable world. Marina thought she could sit for hours like this, suspended, watching the life of the street.
From further down the block she heard a loud wail. It was the sound of a child, but louder and more frantic than any child’s cry she had ever heard. She walked to the bottom of the steps and looked down the street. A few houses on, a small African child was lying on the sidewalk, every limb stiff and splayed out, his face contorted with fury. His legs thrashed against the fire hydrant, kicking so violently that a blue sandal arced through the air on to the road. A young woman wearing a patterned wrap tied around her waist stood a few feet away, clutching a plastic shopping bag. The girl made no effort to comfort the child, just stared at the ground while he continued to scream wildly, his back arching and tears streaming down his face. Surely the girl couldn’t be the hysterical child’s mother. She seemed so separate from the little boy.
Marina couldn’t help feeling that she was transgressing, witnessing some private moment. There was such a frightening wilfulness on display, more than a child’s angry tantrum. This crying was nothing that could be appealed to. Just then, the girl turned and fixed Marina in her gaze, huge eyes glaring out of her sharp face. How old was she? She looked no more than seventeen or eighteen. But those eyes. Marina wondered if she should approach them, but there was something daunting and guarded about the girl. What could Marina possibly offer them? A glass of water, a piece of chocolate to bribe the child?
Suddenly the girl walked swiftly away from the child, past Marina and west towards Lenox Avenue, her shopping bag banging against her legs. She did not glance back once at the little boy, who remained on the sidewalk screaming. Marina stood up and hurried down the steps towards him. He was in a frenzy. Grief was the only word she could summon for it. Such a serious word for such a small child, but it felt to her like pure, raging sorrow. An adult kind of desolation. His contorted face, his furious flailing, the toneless wail coming from him. She picked him up and set him on his feet, her hands around his tiny ribs, his chest hot and damp through his shirt. The little boy stared at her, still crying but stunned for a moment out of his frenzy. She had never seen such enormous eyes in a child’s face; they were almost too large. He was very beautiful, fragile and baby-like, but there was something fierce and nascent about him too, something not of the child at all. Dark whorls of hair grew neatly around his shining forehead. He was older than she had first thought, perhaps two years old.
The child watched her warily, his body still heaving, his tiny shoeless foot on the hot concrete. She retrieved the plastic sandal from the side of the road and pushed the boy’s hot, dusty foot into it. The buckle was missing.
‘Come on,’ she said, taking hold of the child’s hand. ‘We have to catch up to her.’ He was quietening now, and walked along readily enough beside her. He stared up at Marina, his cheeks wet and flushed.
The young woman was standing on the corner, waiting for the light to change. Would she have crossed? Marina wondered about it afterwards. Would she have walked across that road? When they reached her, the boy slipped out of Marina’s grasp and ran and pressed himself against the woman’s legs, his face turned into her thigh. She did not acknowledge Marina or speak to the child, simply shifted her shopping bag to the other hand and took the boy’s arm. She did not hold his hand, Marina noticed, but circled her fingers around his wrist. The two of them crossed the street and walked away, the little boy trying to keep the broken shoe from slipping off his foot.
Back inside the house Marina stood in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil and staring out at the green square of the garden, at the climbing jasmine that covered the high mesh fence. The jasmine always made her think of rich, riotous abundance, of untarnished hope. How extraordinary that it had grown so quickly. From a hook on the fence the old brass bird feeder swung heavily in the wind. It was something they had found in India. It was supposed to hold oil lanterns but Ben had decided it should be a bird feeder, pouring seeds into the tiny brass cups that had once held sacred oil in some distant temple. Jacob worried that the birdseed would attract rats, that the garden would become infested with pigeons, but Marina liked the idea of creating a way station for the birds. In the Hula Valley in Israel each year, corn was spread out for the thousands of migratory cranes that stopped there to rest on their journey to Africa. It was not done purely out of kindness; the birds could decimate the surrounding fields, so the corn was spread to protect the farmers’ crops. Still, it felt like a kind of welcoming.
After she and Jacob had bought the brownstone, they ripped out the whole rear wall and replaced it with steel-framed French doors, so that the view of the garden was elegantly segmented, the kitchen airy and bright. The old painted floorboards they had uncovered under several layers of linoleum proved beyond saving, so they were torn up and replaced with a pale grey travertine. Under the morning sun the floor took on the hue of an old shell, something pure and ancient, with its tiny rippling veins and stony swirls. It embarrassed Marina sometimes, the pleasure this house gave her. The delicate spine of stairs threading through the floors, the intricate cornices, the black-and-white-tiled entrance hall; there was nothing infelicitous, nothing that was not beautiful. From the very beginning it felt to her a place where they could all be their best possible selves. The homes that had come before –the dark apartment where she and her mother and brother had lived for so many years on Union Street in Crown Heights; the crowded dormitories of her college years in California; the tiny studio over a Caribbean grocery store in Los Angeles; even the Park Avenue apartment – all seemed transient and inadequate now, places she had to pass through to come here.
She made a pot of mint tea and looked around the room. There was the vase full of pale-pink peonies that Rose had brought her the day before, the gleaming oak kitchen table that a carpenter friend had made for them. There were the rows of handmade ceramic plates lined up on the shelves, the crumpled newspaper that Jacob had left folded open to the unfinished crossword, the flyer on the refrigerator announcing a lecture on Yehuda Amichai at the 92nd Street Y. This was her home, her light-filled kitchen. All of these things belonged to her. Standing there with the teapot in her hands she was filled with a weird sense of terror. Everything they had created, all this reassuring domesticity, could vanish in an instant, could prove to have been provisional. An illusion of happiness. She could be cast out from this place, everything she had loved shimmering behind her in the distance. Marina put her hand to her chest, resting her fingers against the sudden quick skipping of her heart.
This was foolishness, pure foolishness. She knew it was something to do with her mother, this inability to trust happiness when it came, to feel always the impossibility of its permanence. Nothing would disappear, nothing would evaporate. They were safe, all of them. This house would stand, she and her husband would go on loving each other. Ben would come back to them. They would go to Fire Island next month. This book she was writing would turn out well, better than she imagined. Marina picked up the teacup from the counter and walked upstairs to her desk.
Jacob arrived home late in the afternoon. Even after all the years of living together, something in her still lifted when she heard the click of the front door opening and his voice calling out to her. Her husband, home from work, his shirt a little wrinkled, the top button undone. He kissed her on the lips and presented a loaf of bread to her from behind his back with a flourish.
‘The last loaf of marble rye. Wrestled from the hordes at Zabar’s.’
‘Ah, a true warrior. Thank you, darling.’
‘I’m going to put the kettle on. Shall I make a pot?’
‘Yes, I’ll be right down.’
Marina stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Jacob absorbed in the rituals of homecoming: taking off his jacket, emptying his pockets. His leather satchel bulged with the files of the patients he had seen that day. Later that evening he would read through the notes he had made, underlining, summarising. Such a mind for detail, such a care in her husband for his patients; and yet he also had the knack of distance, the line that had to be drawn. A holy circle around his own self. In his office in Chelsea the shelves were crammed with long rows of his patients’ files, battered manila folders full of scrawled notes and observations. Marina thought of those rows of files as the spreading body of memory itself. Lives shadowed by loss and longing, by betrayal and loneliness, and by ordinary humiliations. Sometimes she felt an irrational jealousy towards Jacob’s patients. It was ridiculous, she knew, and she would never admit it to him. There were several patients he had known for much longer than he had known her. Some had been in therapy with him for twenty years. Every week they brought their lives to him to be deciphered, offering themselves up to his wise listening, his carefully dispensed counsel.
Back in those first days in California, Jacob had made notes about her in the same way that he jotted down certain observations during a session with a patient. He admitted this to her later and she was delighted at the chronicling of remembered phrases, things she had said that had struck him, expressions she used. A poem about swallows by Nemerov that she quoted. A story about her West Indian landlord, who played the clarinet and had named his small daughters Swing and Sway. She remembered laughing with him about it during one of their first meetings. He read his scribbles again and again after they parted, Jacob told her, as if they might reveal something vital about the nature of their relationship. She had found this reassuring, the realisation that he too was an obsessive archivist, a noticer and preserver of things.
