Swimming Across the Hudson

by Joshua Henkin

  The first two nights I drove her there and waited nearby until she was done shooting. But the next night she insisted on going alone. “It’s my work,” she said. “I can’t be distracted.”

  I was afraid something would happen to her.

  “Don’t worry,” Jenny said, and she squeezed my hand. “I’ll be all right.”

  Yet I had to wonder about her judgment. She had married Steve while still in college—married him on a whim, it seemed to me, going to City Hall one afternoon accompanied by a witness they’d met on BART. She’d given birth to Tara a year later, not knowing what she would do when she left school or how she would support her. From the start, she said, she’d had no idea if the marriage would work. Steve walked out when Tara was still an infant, carrying his belongings on the back of his motorcycle. He drove that motorcycle wherever he went, drove it on the freeways without a helmet—a sure sign that he was irresponsible and that the marriage was doomed from the start.

  “Lots of people drive motorcycles,” Jenny said to me once.

  “I know. James Dean drove a motorcycle. Look what happened to him.”

  “James Dean died in a car crash.”

  “So what? If it hadn’t been one thing it would have been another.”

  Jenny had told me she’d gone hang-gliding in college. She was older now, but she still took risks. And I still worried about her.

  Meanwhile, I had time on my hands. I’d been sleeping late, then going to play basketball in playgrounds around the city. I’d been rereading Dickens. I’d taken up jogging to get in better shape.

  My sloth bothered Jenny. She didn’t like that I was lounging around while she was working doubly hard.

  I volunteered to take on extra household duties. I made sure to do the laundry and prepare dinner. I cleaned the apartment and paid the bills. But I still had lots of free time. And Jenny wasn’t pleased.

  “You should do something,” she said.

  “I am doing something. I’m playing basketball and reading Dickens.”

  “I mean really do something. Something constructive.”

  “Jen, you’re the one who wanted to be a tea lady. So I’m being a tea lady for both of us.”

  She wasn’t amused.

  During the second week of August, my boss called to tell me that the chair of the history department had had a heart attack and would have to retire. The school was looking for a replacement—a younger teacher to take a three-year renewable term—and he wanted to know if I was interested. I said I’d get back to him, but I was only stalling before I said no. I didn’t want to seem rash or ungrateful. The offer was last-minute; I’d have to spend the next month working on the curriculum. Besides, I didn’t want to commit to a three-year term.

  This made Jenny angry.

  “What difference does it make if I’m chair of the department?”

  “It makes no difference. I just hate your reasons for not doing it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that you don’t want to work this summer.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Or the fact that you won’t commit to a three-year term.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I’m not even sure I want to be teaching in three years.”

  “What do you want to be doing in three years?”

  “That’s the point. I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Stop it. I know plenty of things. Don’t make me out to be more aimless than I am.”

  “You’re not aimless. You’re conflicted.”

  “Stop analyzing me.”

  “You couldn’t commit to a three-day term, let alone a three-year term.”

  I glared at her.

  “All right. Let’s forget about this.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”

  But Jenny didn’t forget about it. Every issue bled into others; everything had to do with our relationship. When we came back from Big Sur, I’d seen an advertisement for an adoptees’ support group and decided to join. The group met once a week for dinner at members’ houses. Almost immediately, I volunteered to host.

  This too upset Jenny. Fifteen minutes before the other members arrived, she left the apartment for the evening. “I’m out of here,” she said.

  When she came home, she asked me about our get-together and whether I was enjoying my secret life.

  “I don’t have a secret life.”

  “Once a week you meet a bunch of strangers and confess to each other.”

  “They’re not strangers and nobody confesses. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “What’s it like, then? It sounds like the Rotary Club, or some men’s group where you read Robert Bly and get up in the middle of the night and paint each other’s houses.”

  “Come on, Jen. It’s just a bunch of us getting together. We talk about what it’s like to be adopted.”

  “You’ve got adoption on the brain.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “The problem is you’re rooted in the past, and therefore the two of us are in limbo.” Susan had given me up thirty-one years ago, she said, and I pretended it had just happened. But it hadn’t just happened. The past was the past and now was now; we needed to decide where our relationship was going.

  “Going?” I said. “We live together. We wake up in the morning in the same bed. We share our secrets. Where does a relationship need to go?”

  “We live together now. But will we live together next month, or next year?”

  “I hope so.”

  “And will we get married? I’m thirty-two years old, Ben, and I might want to have another child. Do you want children? We’ve been going out for two and a half years, and I realized the other day I had no idea if you do. There are all these things we never talk about.”

  She was right. We rarely talked about the future. It was mostly my fault.

  “You’ve met Susan,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “You’re the one who encouraged me to meet her.”

  “I know I did. But I was hoping it would help you move on. Now you know where you come from. Is it that I’m not Jewish?”

  “That’s part of it.” But if I wasn’t willing to marry a non-Jew, what was I doing living with Jenny, living with her as if we were in fact married, quietly assuming we had a future?

  “Well, that’s not going to change. I won’t be Jewish next year or the year after that. I’m sorry, Ben. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you, but we can’t pretend we’re twenty. We need to make plans, together or apart.”

  “We will,” I said. “I promise.”

  But things stayed tense between Jenny and me. She’d get angry over insignificant matters—a pair of mismatched socks I accidentally placed in her drawer; the music on too loud while she was preparing for work; my showing up five minutes late to meet her for dinner.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I’m being unfair.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Tara will be home in a week, and things will settle down.”

  I was counting on that. I thought of Tara as some kind of savior, as a calming influence at the very least.

  Then one morning I got a call from Jonathan. He sounded terrible, his voice so hoarse I almost didn’t recognize it.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve got a fever,” he croaked.

  “Where’s Sandy?”

  “In New Mexico. Visiting his parents. I can’t think straight.”

  When I got to Jonathan’s, I was carrying Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, two cans of Cherry Coke, a hot-water bottle, some throat lozenges, and a jar of Vicks VapoRub. I didn’t know what all of his symptoms were, so I’d brought everything I could find.

  He’d left the door to the house unlocked. He was lying in bed, half asleep.

  “You look terrible.” I placed my hand on his forehead. He had a high fever.


  “I’ve never been this sick. I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not going to die.” But I was scared. This was how AIDS started. You got colds. You became weaker. Jonathan looked worn-out and pale; he was congested. Crumpled wads of tissue dotted the floor. He’d been too sick to throw them out. He had the flu. Who got the flu in August?

  I didn’t know much about AIDS, but I found myself looking for symptoms. He had no lesions on his body. He was thin, but he’d always been thin. I couldn’t ask him if he was HIV-positive. He hadn’t been willing to discuss it before, and I was too scared to raise it now.

  I gave him a glass of Cherry Coke.

  “Maybe I have the mumps,” he said.

  “You don’t have the mumps.”

  “That’s right. I had them already.”

  “You never had them.”

  “That’s what I get for pretending.”

  Good. He still had his sense of humor. “You’ll be all right.”

  “I need to throw up.” He pulled himself out of bed and found his way to the bathroom.

  I spent the afternoon with him as he drifted in and out of sleep, then made him toast and tea for dinner. I turned the radio on to a classical station in the hope that the music would soothe him. I went home and packed a bag, telling Jenny I would spend the night with him. I slept on the couch in his living room.

  The next morning, he seemed a little better. His temperature had gone down, and he was able to walk around a bit. But when he stood for too long he became woozy and nauseated and had to get back into bed.

  He called in sick to work. I spent the morning with him watching television, playing channel-changer. “Next,” he said when he got bored, and I switched to another talk show, another soap opera, another news program.

  I left around noon, telling him I’d be back in a few hours, and went to the nearest branch of the public library, where I sat in the reference section and read through medical encyclopedias. I found entire sections on AIDS. There were too many opportunistic infections to count. Some I’d heard of, many I hadn’t. Tuberculosis. Kaposi’s sarcoma. Meningitis. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Toxoplasmosis. Thrush. Lymphadenopathy. Cytomegalovirus. Each infection had its own arcane language, which took me to the medical dictionary, which in turn introduced me to more words I didn’t know. Two hours at the library, and I’d come across a greater number of painful ways to die than I’d imagined possible.

  In the evening, Jonathan’s fever broke. I spent the night at home. When I called him the next morning he sounded back to normal. He was getting ready to go to the office.

  But I was still shaken. Though he was better now, this might have been the beginning of something much worse.

  That day, I wandered through the Castro, staring at the men I passed. Some were obviously sick. A few were sallow and skeletal; others were covered with purple lesions. Several men walked with canes. One was led by a Seeing Eye dog. Others looked healthy, but you never knew. Fifty percent was the figure I’d heard. I stared at everyone, trying to find a common denominator among the men I saw.

  I strolled along Market Street, then up Castro to Twenty-fourth, then east to Noe, then back to Market. I may as well have been doing laps. All the while I worried about Jonathan, and imagined gruesome things that could happen to him.

  I called him at work to see how he was feeling.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “My fever’s gone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He told me he was.

  I called him again the next afternoon, from a pay phone near the basketball court where I was playing.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You were sick.”

  “That was days ago, Ben. I’m fine. I told you. You sound like a Jewish mother.”

  “I’m just worried about you.”

  “Well, don’t be.”

  When I got home that afternoon, a letter was waiting for me.

  Dear Mr. Suskind,

  I received your letter. I wasn’t planning to respond to it, but suffise it to say, I’ve changed my mind. I’m in touch with Susan. She’s still my wife. I know how she’s doing. I’d prefer it if you’d mind your own business. Don’t patronize me. Susan’s out there to see you, and if your feeling guilty about it, keep it to yourself. What’s happening in my marriage is my business—mine and Susan’s. I’m not interested in your counseling. I try to have better manners than this, and I’m not usually so abrupt with strangers. But I want to make myself perfectly clear.

  Sincerely,

  Frank Green

  My first thought was, Bad spelling and grammar. Suffice was with a c. You’re feeling, not your feeling. No wonder Susan was spending time with me. I had good spelling and grammar, and Frank didn’t.

  My second thought was, Oh shit. I’d gotten Frank angry, as I should have expected. Had he told Susan about my letter? Maybe she was waiting for me to confess. That was almost worse—not knowing, being dangled.

  I called her up to see if she’d say anything.

  “How are things with your husband?” I asked.

  “About what you’d expect.”

  But that was the problem. I didn’t know what to expect. That was how everything went with Susan. It was one day this, another day that.

  “I wouldn’t know what to expect,” I said.

  “Well, I’m here and he’s there. That should say something.”

  Maybe he hadn’t told her.

  When Tara came home, I was relieved. I hugged her in the doorway to our apartment. “I missed you,” I said. “I really did.”

  “You act like I was kidnapped or something.” Tara told us about Amy, her new best friend, who was born in New York City. Amy and Tara had given each other crew cuts. “I’m moving to New York,” Tara said. She gave Jenny a list of new dietary restrictions, although it wasn’t clear what unified them. She said she no longer ate processed food. She told Jenny that she wanted to go to boarding school on the East Coast, that it was time for her to live on her own, the way she had in the wilderness at camp.

  “Boarding school isn’t in the wilderness,” Jenny said. “It’s in boring towns in Massachusetts where the headmaster makes sure you’re properly dressed and you have to do a lot of homework. Besides, it’s expensive and you’re too young to go.”

  But Tara was insistent. “I’ll pay for it,” she said. “I’ll start babysitting.”

  “You’ll have to baby-sit a few hundred years in order to pay for boarding school.”

  “I got a new hole in my ear.”

  Jenny frowned. “I noticed. I hope you used a sterilized needle.”

  “I did it with a fork.”

  “You did not.”

  “I’m going to school on the East Coast because I can’t stand California.”

  “What’s wrong with California?” I asked.

  “It’s boring.”

  I ran my hand through the fuzz on her head. “I, for one, like California.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You got to grow up in New York.”

  “And you get to grow up in San Francisco, where the ocean is only a few miles away and you can play outdoors all year.”

  “I like cold weather.”

  “Well, Ben and I have good news for you,” Jenny said. We told Tara about our plans for a trip to New York to surprise my father for his birthday.

  On a Friday morning, Jenny, Tara, and I flew to New York. Sandy and Jonathan would come later that afternoon, after they were done with work.

  “You and I are flying separately,” Jonathan joked, “so that if one of us gets killed, the other will be around to take care of Mom and Dad.”

  Someday we would have to take care of them. My father was healthy, but he’d started to slow down. My previous visit to New York, I’d found myself testing him, quickening my gait as we walked together, hoping that he could keep up with me.

  I sat on the plane between Jenny and Tara,
reading a copy of Time magazine. A movie was playing—something with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme—but I hadn’t rented the headphones. I tried to read the actors’ lips.

  I’d ordered a kosher meal. I always did this when I flew, for sentimental reasons more than anything else. When I was a child, I liked getting the kosher meal in its unperforated wrapping, my name stamped on the foil as if the food had been mailed to me directly from God.

  We landed at Kennedy late that afternoon. My parents wouldn’t be there; they didn’t know we were coming. Even so, as we walked toward the baggage claim area, I scanned the names on the cardboard signs.

  We reached the apartment at seven. “Happy Labor Day,” I said when my parents opened the door. “Happy birthday, Dad.”

  “Oh my God,” my mother said.

  We all hugged one another. Then we huddled in a big hug. My parents were thrilled to see the three of us—even Jenny, it seemed.

  “What are you doing here?” my father asked.

  “It’s your birthday, Dad. I’ll never again have a father who turns seventy-five.”

  He smiled. “I hope you’ll be here on my hundred and twentieth.” That’s what he was entitled to hope for. Jews prayed to live as long as Moses.

  “We’re a little short on food,” my mother said, “but we’ll manage.”

  Tara emptied her pockets of a dozen packets of peanuts she’d stolen from the plane.

  My mother touched her hand. “You got a haircut, hon.”

  “And another hole in my ear.”

  My father said the kiddush. He and I sang the sabbath songs, everyone else humming with us. The room was warm, the candles flickered, and I kicked off my shoes and rested my feet on the carpet, feeling Jenny’s toes pressed against mine.

  “I’m glad you’re all here,” my mother said.

  “We are too,” said Jenny.

  My parents’ magazines sat next to the grand piano. Years of issues were accumulated there. Friday night at midnight, when the lamps went off, my father would press his New York Review of Books against the window, hoping to read another paragraph in the light from the streetlamps.

  At eleven there was a knock on the door. My mother looked startled when she opened it. Jonathan and Sandy were standing there, tired smiles on their faces.