World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  But Thisbe, it was clear, was different. She was pleasant to Marilyn, but she didn’t need her, and Marilyn doesn’t like not to feel needed. Mere weeks into their relationship, Marilyn thought: Leo could end up marrying her. He was twenty-one, too young to be with the girl he would marry. But really, she knows, it was something else. Her baby, her only son, was being taken from her. It shocked her to feel that primal possessiveness, that oedipal urge but in reverse, and though she tried to hide it, she wasn’t able to.

  Did she think that, given a choice between his girlfriend and his mother, a young man would choose his mother? Did she believe that if she wasn’t welcoming Thisbe would simply leave? Her error had been in thinking she could act out and that she and Thisbe would have time to reconcile. Years would pass and there would be a thawing between them. What had once been begrudging would become openhearted, warm. She and Thisbe would learn to like each other; perhaps the feeling would even blossom into love. Thisbe would be spending her life with Leo; she would be the mother of Marilyn’s grandchildren. Marilyn even allowed herself to imagine her old age, David dead already, Thisbe coming to visit her in the nursing home, where the waiting rooms were filled with daughters and daughters-in-law. Mothers and daughters-in-law: such volatile, loaded relationships. Yet mother-daughter relationships could be loaded, too, and Marilyn had managed to have good relationships with her daughters. She saw no reason why she couldn’t do the same with Thisbe. Only now, she realizes, she made a mistake.

  She’s looking at Thisbe from across the table, and for a moment it’s as if no one else is in the room and it’s just her and Thisbe, separated by all that burnished blond wood. A bee buzzes against the porch window, as if trying to ram its way in.

  “Darling,” Marilyn says. She can hear her heart beat like a thrush in her forehead.

  “Please, Mom,” Lily says. “Leave Thisbe alone.”

  “What did I do?”

  Lily’s thinking of Wyeth, of her conversation with Thisbe just hours ago, hoping to shield her as best she can, to protect her from her mother.

  “It’s okay,” Thisbe says. “I’m all right.”

  Clarissa, trying to redirect the conversation, says, “Are we set for the memorial? It’s at noon, right?”

  “But we should get there early,” Marilyn says.

  “Did you finish your speech?” Lily asks Clarissa.

  “No,” Clarissa says. “Did you?”

  Lily shakes her head. She has begun it and begun it and begun it again. She should stand at the podium and read twelve different opening paragraphs, each one more atrocious than the next.

  “Will you be speaking, Marilyn?” Nathaniel asks.

  Marilyn shakes her head. She spoke at Leo’s funeral, and she’s been speaking throughout the year in the nation’s op-ed pages. She’ll leave it to her daughters to speak.

  “And Dad?” Noelle says.

  “Last we spoke, he didn’t know.”

  The silence settles on them like a lead coat.

  Clarissa, grasping for some subject, says, “Nathaniel will be wearing a tie. I can’t remember the last time he wore one.”

  Noelle, too, trying to keep the conversation aloft, says, “I bought four ties for the boys duty free at the airport.” She got five ties, in fact, one for Amram, but it looks like that one won’t be necessary. At least it will spare them another fight. Amram thinks ties are a woman’s idea of how a man should look.

  “I wore a tuxedo once,” Dov says.

  “Well, you won’t be wearing one tomorrow,” says Yoni.

  Akiva spears his sandwich with a fork.

  “Akiva,” Noelle says, “stop playing with your food.”

  But Akiva goes on playing with it, stabbing the bread until it’s bullet-pocked, and Noelle doesn’t have the will to object anymore.

  Ari, playing with his sandwich himself, says, “I never got to wear a tuxedo.”

  “You will someday,” Noelle says. “If you want to.”

  “Count yourself lucky,” Nathaniel says. “Some of us spend our lives trying to avoid wearing a tuxedo.”

  Ari says, “I want to wear a tuxedo to Uncle Leo’s memorial.”

  “Well you can’t, honey,” Noelle says.

  There’s more silence; again Marilyn is staring at Thisbe. She still doesn’t know why Lily rebuked her, why anyone is rebuking anyone now.

  Thisbe, as if sensing this, says, “It’s okay.” She’s extending her hand to Marilyn, but she’s across the table, out of reach.

  “I don’t know,” Marilyn says.

  “Me, either,” says Thisbe, though she doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know. She’s eating the chicken thighs and the leeks, the pasta salad, Noelle’s food, the kosher food—the one gentile at the table and look what she’s ended up with. She’s thinking, stupidly, that the food doesn’t taste kosher, feeling as always when it comes to Judaism like an ignoramus, a fool.

  “I wasn’t always the easiest mother-in-law,” Marilyn says.

  “Oh, Marilyn. Please don’t say that.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “You were a good mother-in-law,” Thisbe says, feeling the words catch in her mouth, convinced she sounds insincere, ashamed she’s forced to say this. With her right hand she’s forking the food into her mouth while across her body her left hand moves of its own accord, trundling along her lap like a rodent. Where is everyone to rescue her? Where’s Clarissa? Where’s Lily? Where’s Noelle? Where of all times is Amram, whom she can usually count on to distract the others? He has vanished, and everyone else is quietly chewing their food, a bunch of ruminants, unmoving and silent, as if they’ve been ossified by Marilyn’s words.

  “You must think I’m ridiculous.”

  “Why would I think that?” Thisbe says.

  “Spending my life writing tendentious op-eds.”

  “They’re not tendentious,” she says. “I like them.” Though what she feels is mostly a mixture of discomfort and relief. Discomfort that a year after Leo died he remains in the news, that her life is still fit for consumption. Relief that Marilyn has taken up the mantel, that she’s become the public face of it all and, in so doing, has spared her.

  “I could waterboard Alberto Gonzales himself and it wouldn’t bring Leo back. I’d like to spit on Bush. The nerve of the man to claim my son as his ally. Leo hated that war.”

  He did, Thisbe thinks, though he hated it the way most people she knows hated it, idly at first, and then less idly, as things started to go bad. The war was over, in any case, by the time Leo was killed; he was covering the occupation, and though there wouldn’t have been an occupation without a war, there would have been other occupations, and other wars too, and Leo would have found his way to them. Thisbe dislikes Bush as much as her mother-in-law does, but when Leo was abducted, accused by his captors of being a U.S. agent, when he was placed before the cameras, looking woozy, lobotomized, was it any wonder Bush enlisted him for his cause? Bush lied about WMDs; mischaracterizing Leo was small stuff by comparison. And the left, in embracing Leo, mischaracterizes him, too. Because Leo wasn’t interested in being a hero, certainly not a political one. What Marilyn fails to understand is that Leo wasn’t political; he was a journalist. He refused to tell Thisbe how he voted, and though she had no doubt, his political views were beside the point. What he wanted was adventure; in another era, he’d have traveled to Africa to hunt elephant tusk. But Thisbe can’t tell her mother-in-law this, can’t say what she believes, which is that if Leo were alive he wouldn’t recognize the person she’s writing about.

  Now Marilyn is talking about an anniversary party she and David threw for themselves. “It was our thirtieth,” she tells Thisbe. “I don’t know if you remember it.”

  Of course Thisbe remembers. She’d been with Leo only a few months at the time, and Marilyn hadn’t invited her to the party. She was twenty-one years old, and did she really want to drive down from Maine to eat canapés with her new boyfriend’s parents? That had been Ma
rilyn’s defense. Christmas break was coming soon, and Thisbe would probably prefer to be off skiing. But when Leo found out she hadn’t been invited, he was furious. And Thisbe herself was insulted, hurt. Yet it’s been years since that party, so that now, when Marilyn apologizes for the snub, it takes Thisbe a moment to realize what she’s talking about. “I haven’t thought about that party in years.”

  “Well, I have,” Marilyn says.

  “I came to other parties,” Thisbe says. “I was included in everything after that.” And there’s this, she thinks: she’s here now, for the memorial.

  “I was so sorry when you two broke up,” Marilyn says.

  For a second, Thisbe doesn’t know what Marilyn is talking about. Then she realizes: Marilyn is referring to when they graduated from college and she and Leo split up. They were twenty-two at the time, not yet ready to marry, not yet ready to live together, even, and Thisbe was intent on taking the Foreign Service exam—she was hoping to go to Ghana—and Leo was off to his own far-flung places. They didn’t meet again until a few years later, when they ran into each other on the Upper West Side beneath the marquee of the Beacon Theater. Neil Diamond was playing that night, and Thisbe said to Leo, “You’re not going to that concert, are you? Please don’t tell me you’ve started to like Neil Diamond.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not at such loose ends.”

  “But you’re a little at loose ends?”

  “I have missed you.”

  “We were young,” she says now. “It took us a while to figure things out.”

  “But you did,” Marilyn says. “That’s what’s most important.”

  Thisbe tries to look away, but it’s like those 3-D baseball cards from the cereal box: whichever way you hold Marilyn, she’s staring back at you.

  “I remember when you two met,” Marilyn says. “Leo fell in love with you instantly.”

  And Thisbe, reddening, says, “I fell in love with him, too.”

  Only now, looking at Calder, who’s been witness to all this, and at his cousins, staring down at their cold cuts in perplexity and embarrassment, Thisbe says to Marilyn, “Maybe this could wait.” She worries what Calder will say if the conversation continues; she fears he’ll mention Wyeth.

  “Why shouldn’t they hear this?” Marilyn says. “They should know about Leo.”

  “They do know about him,” Thisbe says. “I talk to Calder about him all the time.”

  “Well, I want them to hear about him from me too. Anyway, I don’t believe in protecting children, certainly not from something like this.”

  I’m not protecting him, Thisbe wants to say, even as she’s thinking, It’s up to me to decide whether I protect him.

  But Marilyn has quietly left the table. When she returns, she’s holding a large cardboard box with Leo’s possessions inside it. She removes a photo album, which she passes around from person to person, the adults holding the album for the children to see, making sure nothing gets smudged.

  Soon it’s Thisbe’s turn to look at the album, and she’s thinking there’s something unfair about photos; she’d like to have them banned. She flips to a photo of Leo from when he was six, playing the lion in a children’s theater version of The Wizard of Oz. And another photo, from the cast party, when he’s eating ice cream through his lion’s mouth, fed to him in spoonfuls by his sisters.

  “He was a bottomless pit,” Marilyn says.

  Noelle says, “He used to eat all of Mom’s leftover apple strudel, then try to pawn it off on someone else.”

  “On his friends,” says Marilyn.

  “One time,” Clarissa says, “he blamed a band of strudel-eating intruders.”

  “Strudel bandits!” Noelle says.

  “Remember when he was a teenager,” Marilyn says, “and he made Dad and me buy him a mini-fridge?”

  “He kept it next to his bed,” Clarissa says, “stocked with provisions for a middle-of-the-night meal.”

  “Thank God for his fast metabolism,” Marilyn says.

  In other photos, Leo is holding a lacrosse stick, a badminton racquet; he’s wearing an old headband; he’s drawing at an easel. “Who knows where all that stuff came from,” Noelle says.

  “He and his friends shared everything,” Marilyn says.

  “They were such girls,” says Lily. “They even shared clothes.”

  Marilyn has risen from her chair and is standing now behind Thisbe, who holds the album next to her plate.

  “Who’s that?” Thisbe asks. She’s pointing at a photo of Leo, who’s spinning a basketball on his middle finger, showing off for some girl.

  “Leo’s first girlfriend,” Marilyn says.

  “Nora?”

  Marilyn shakes her head. “The first girl Leo kissed, the summer after sixth grade. Kimball, I think her name was. He never told you about her?”

  “If he did, I’ve forgotten about it. I knew about Nora, of course, but other than that, our past was the past and I was fine with that.”

  “Mom,” Noelle says, “are you trying to make Thisbe jealous?”

  “She has nothing to be jealous of,” Marilyn says. “Not of Nora or anyone else. When Leo fell for her, it was like, Wow.”

  Thisbe’s thinking of Nora now, the wishbone image of her. They met only once, at the hardware store, and when Leo introduced them everyone was uncomfortable. She didn’t see her again until Leo’s funeral, where Nora inserted herself front and center, impresario of an event that wasn’t hers. Nora’s nothing to her now; she never was, really. So she’s surprised to discover she still has animus for her, and it startles her, the quiet venom she feels, as she says, “Nora and her eating disorders.”

  “That was the least of it,” Marilyn says. “You’d think Leo, the youngest child, allowed to do whatever he pleased, wouldn’t have been attracted to someone like Nora. But beneath it all he had a savior complex. And then you came along and we all were relieved. Finally, Leo was with someone who didn’t need taking care of.”

  “We all need taking care of,” Thisbe says.

  Akiva asks to be excused, and a palpable relief settles on everyone, as one after the other, as if forming a conga line, the children leave the room.

  Now David comes through in his paint-spattered pants, moving quickly past them as if to say Don’t mind me.

  Marilyn removes a set of weights from the box. “These were Leo’s,” she says. “You know what he called them? Dumbbells for a dumbbell. If only the whole world were as dumb as Leo.” She reminds everyone how Leo, born premature, took to the weight room when he was eleven, and how, a year later, the family adopted a stray Labrador retriever Leo had found cowering beneath a bench in Riverside Park and named her Kingman, after Dave Kingman, the New York Mets home run king. The dog took a liking to Leo and didn’t seem to mind, or was too feeble to object, when every morning as part of his weightlifting routine Leo would bench-press Kingman herself, three sets of twelve repetitions, Kingman prostrate, helpless but good-natured, as she was lifted and lowered and lifted again. And when Leo grew tired of bench-pressing Kingman, when the dog became less pliable, he took to bench-pressing Noelle, who was willing in this way to help him stay in shape: Leo on his back, thrusting lithe Noelle up and down, up and down. Leo, who beat up the school bully, then beat up the kid who made fun of the school bully for Leo’s having been beaten him up.. Leo, Marilyn’s little weightlifting philosopher of a son, bench-pressing Kingman, testing the premise that if you lifted a cow when it was born and kept lifting it every day there would never come a day when you couldn’t lift the cow. “You know what I keep forgetting about Kingman?” Marilyn says. “That dog was a girl.”

  “Yet he named her Kingman,” Noelle says. “He tried to get her to lift her leg to pee.”

  “He always felt outnumbered,” Clarissa says. “That’s why he liked to spend time with Dad. A break from all that estrogen.”

  Though the truth, Marilyn thinks, was that Leo was happy to be the only son in the family: he liked
being the alpha male.

  She lays the weights at Thisbe’s feet. “I want you to have these.”

  “Oh, Marilyn, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t lift weights,” Thisbe says, because it’s the only thing she can think to say, though she does lift weights, and fearing that Marilyn knows this, she corrects herself and says she dislikes free weights, she prefers the machines, then adds that her luggage was already over the weight limit on her trip east and she was forced to pay a fee. She could buy weights, she says, for the price it would cost to carry them back. She will buy weights, she’s tempted to tell her mother-in-law, knowing only that she can’t return home, to Wyeth, with her dead husband’s dumbbells in tow.

  “Here,” Marilyn says. “Take this instead.” And she hands Thisbe a San Diego Chargers football pennant.

  “Leo was the world’s most avid Chargers fan,” Clarissa says. “We never knew why he liked them.”

  Neither did Thisbe. The more the Chargers lost the more devoted he became; he was, in his own way, a lonely man of faith.