World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  “Nothing,” she says. “Everything. I don’t know.” She glances up at him. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I was just remembering that after Leo died Mom and I talked about moving to California.”

  “Oh, come on. Mom never would have moved to California.”

  “Actually, she was the force behind it. She had it in her head that she would close her practice and we’d settle in Berkeley.”

  “What in the world would you have done there?”

  “Beats me. Become full-time grandparents? Though Thisbe’s parents would have already been there. We’d have felt like hangers-on.” He does a couple of knee bends, and now, with his legs locked, he touches his hands to his toes.

  “You’re all movement, Dad, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose.”

  She recalls Leo’s words, “channeled hyperactivity.” It was how he used to describe their parents. And now he’s gone, unable to see just how hyperactive they’ve become. Her father has taken up running and become devoted to opera; her mother is on the tennis courts even more than she used to be. As a teenager, she’d been ranked in the junior division, and she went on to play women’s varsity at Penn before dropping the team in favor of chemistry lab and, after that, medical school. Now she’s up again at six in the morning, hitting ground strokes in Central Park. It isn’t sport for her, it’s exorcism and absolution, and she takes pleasure in dispensing in straight sets whatever hapless male colleague has the temerity to take her on. And, throughout, she has been keeping up a full schedule of patients. It wouldn’t surprise Lily if in the last year her parents have gotten only a few hours of sleep a night. Though she’s not one to talk. She knows about channeled hyperactivity; she hasn’t been sleeping much herself. “You’d have hated California.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “We’d have been back in New York in no time.”

  She knows what he’s thinking, because she’s thinking it, too. What if they’d moved to California and her mother had left him? He’d have been alone then, even more alone than he is now, in a state, a part of the country, where he knew hardly anyone. Though maybe if they’d moved to California, had relocated themselves far from where everything had gone wrong, if they’d started over, the way people for generations have started over in California, they might have been able to work things out.

  She follows him inside, where he filches another stuffed grape leaf. But this one, too, he takes a bite of before leaving it to bleed across a cocktail napkin.

  “You’re breaking into the storehouses,” she says. “Laying waste to the vineyards.”

  “I eat when I get nervous.”

  “Looks more like you gnaw.”

  “In my old age, I’ve started to worry.”

  “Your old age, Dad? You’ve been worried as long as I’ve known you. Compared to you, Mom was a stoic.” Nervous Nellie, they used to call him. Dithering David. He was always delaying them on their way to school. Don’t forget to look both ways. Make sure to cross at the light. He made them wear bicycle helmets, and this was practically before bicycle helmets were invented. Their mother, on the other hand, was on the front lines with her AIDS patients. She was accidentally pricking herself with needles, saying it was all part of the job.

  “Yet it’s on Mom’s behalf that I’m worrying now. She’s terrified things won’t go okay.”

  “What does she think will go wrong?”

  He shrugs.

  “And who is she, anyway, to saddle you with her worries? Don’t you think she’s forfeited that right?”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “What happened to the man who was boycotting dinner last night—that guy walking around with his ladder and paintbrush?”

  “You preferred him?”

  “I did.”

  What can he tell her? That that man is still there, as surely as is the man who is standing before her asking her to be good to her mother? The truth is, it’s not in him to fight. Perhaps he’s just hardwired that way. Or maybe it’s how he was raised, a boyhood spent alone in the company of his mother, a woman with her own whims and tempers. He mourns for Leo no less than Marilyn does even if he isn’t bellowing it into bullhorns. It’s not in him to write op-eds, just as it’s not in him to rage about Bush, though he hates Bush, too. In a way, he thinks his response is more dignified. Whether or not it is, it’s the only response he knows.

  He gets up now and heads across the hall, and Lily, following him, says, “Where are you going, Dad?” but he doesn’t answer her. They pass under the huge ceiling fan, and for a second she feels as if she’s being transported by some gale, her dress billowing as though it’s trying to fly off. But then she’s outside again, on the balcony, and the heat assaults her. Sweat drips down her forearms. A big patch of it blooms across her father’s white shirt; he buttons his jacket to cover it up. “Mom’s afraid of upsetting you.”

  “Why? Am I such a loose cannon?” And she wonders: is she? Is she someone people need to steer clear of?

  “She’s a little scared of you.”

  What’s so scary about her? Much of the time she’s scared herself. Her mother is afraid of her? The woman who chases after drug reps, who brings the pharmaceutical industry to its knees?

  “She thinks you don’t suffer fools gladly.”

  What fools? she thinks. And whom does she need to suffer? No one besides Noelle. Is that what her mother is worried about? Noelle?

  “Go easy on her, okay?”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t pick a fight.”

  They descend the stairs to what looks like an old smoking room, everything upholstered in dark leather. In the corner stands an upright piano, and the walls are lined with black-and-white photographs of old Lenox Brotherhood sports teams. The 1920 Brotherhood Basketball Team. The 1931 Brotherhood Baseball Team. There’s a display of dollhouses behind glass.

  “Mom thinks you’re the quickest to defend Thisbe.”

  “What’s there to defend?” Lily says. “She’s done nothing wrong.”

  “You’ve always been tougher on Mom than on me. Long before any of this ever happened.”

  He’s right, she thinks. Maybe it’s because she and her mother are alike. The lanky ones, the two of them, the reddest of the redheads, fueled by their impatience, which darts like a beam of light into every corner of the room. Compared to them, her father was always softer. He used to carpool Lily and her sisters, off to music lessons and tumbling class, on outings to the Cloisters and Wave Hill. When Leo was old enough, he came along, too. Her father liked being the car-pool dad, even in Manhattan, where owning a car wasn’t worth the trouble. He was a frustrated driver, a man who loved to drive in a city with no real roadway; it was the one thing he disliked about New York. In his twenties, he bought a Peugeot convertible in which he drove the women he dated; it was, he said, a test of their will. He did it with Marilyn too; he wasn’t about to marry someone who wouldn’t ride in his convertible. With the children in back, he would make a game out of driving, taking them up Amsterdam Avenue where the traffic lights were staggered, seeing how long he could go without hitting a red light. But he was always safe. When Lily and her sisters were in junior high school and the carpooling stopped, when the only driving he did was late at night, moving the car from one side of the street to the other in deference to the city’s parking restrictions, he would ask if they wanted to come along. “Come on,” he said. “A little alternate-side-of-the-street-parking fun?” When they were small, he took a leave from teaching so he could care for them while their mother did her second residency. In their picture books with the animal figures, they would mistake the mother for the father, the one with the apron standing over the stack of dishes. When they fell and hurt themselves, they instinctively called out, “Daddy!”

  Lily takes his hand and they go out front, where the holiday traffic is approaching them.. A car drives past with a bumper sticker that reads BUSH IS LISTENING. USE BIG WORDS. And another bumper s
ticker: PRACTICE GENTLE ACTS OF IMPEACHMENT. They’re in friendly territory, David thinks. He points to Lily’s van parked out front, with its KERRY-EDWARDS sticker on the window. Back at the house, his and Marilyn’s car is parked, too, with its own KERRY-EDWARDS bumper sticker.

  “I know how to attach myself to losers, don’t I?” Lily says. She’s thinking of the Mets—and now the Nationals—but also of John Kerry. It’s been almost a year since the election, but she can’t get herself to throw that sticker out. The fact is, she’s happy to defend John Kerry. Everyone she knows voted for him, though they did so with the feeling at least he’s better than Bush. She alone was enthusiastic. The long, dour face, the patrician moroseness, the French speaking, the flip-flopping, the polysyllabism: all the things people disliked about Kerry are precisely what drew her to him. There’s a way in which she was a little in love with John Kerry and she remains so to this day.

  “You always were a contrarian.”

  “I suppose I was.” Oppositional Lily, her friends used to call her. She was captain of her high school parliamentary debate team, which meant one day she argued one side and the next day she argued the other, and if she’d been a student at Princeton in 1979 she would have stood with Sally Frank, suing the all-male eating clubs, taking the case to the New Jersey Supreme Court. But she was twelve in 1979. When she got to Princeton, Cottage Club was about to settle; it held its first coed Bicker when she was a sophomore. She had no interest in bickering Cottage—Cottage was still the old Princeton, even if it had capitulated and gone coed—but she bickered anyway just to prove she could get in, and as soon as she was admitted, she resigned. She clerked on the Supreme Court after graduating from law school, for Justice Scalia. She was the only liberal clerk out of four (most years Scalia didn’t have even one liberal), for a justice she found clever and winning but whom she consistently disagreed with. (She likes to say that if she could have only added the word not to all of Scalia’s sentences he would have written an opinion she liked.) She spent the whole year shouting at the other clerks. The combat in the justice’s chambers (“What’s going on in there?” people would ask) and continuing over lunch on the steps of the Court, the beers late at night when the arguing resumed, everyone going home for a few hours of sleep (“No hard feelings,” the clerks would say as they departed), only to begin afresh the following morning— Lily still recalls that as one of the happiest years of her life.

  A man comes up the road in sunglasses and a seersucker suit, walking his Newfoundland. From a couple hundred feet away, Lily can already see the spit spraying out of the dog’s mouth, testament to the breed’s affinity for drool, or to her own eyesight, which is still twenty-ten in both eyes. In seventh grade, when Clarissa needed glasses but didn’t want them, she had Lily accompany her to the eye doctor and Lily fed her the answers to the chart while the doctor was looking away.

  Owner and dog seem headed toward the Community Center. A dog at a memorial service, Lily thinks. That would have been Leo’s idea of fun. But now the Newfoundland has turned up the block, past the center and into town, his owner pulled after him.

  Out in front, her father, seated on a bench, is staring into the distance.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He shrugs. “I’m gazing into the great beyond.”

  “All you need is your telescope.”

  “Now, that’s an idea.”

  Lily hasn’t seen his telescope on this trip, though she expected it to be out, and for him to be behind it, peering into the heavens. He has joined the local Berkshires astronomy club, and he’s always dragging Lily’s mother to some remote meeting place beneath the stars. “It’s how I spend my summer weekends,” Marilyn says, “standing in the dark in an abandoned field.” When she tries to talk to him during these outings, David’s always shushing her, as if he thinks she’ll wake up the constellations. In the wilting heat, with the mosquitoes swarming around him, he can be found on the deck pointing his telescope at the sky, gazing into the stratosphere.

  Lily leans against the bench, ruminating over a celery stick. She crunches on it like a hare.

  “Come on,” her father says. “Let’s take a walk.” But he seems to mean only around the building, because he has guided her out back to the porch, where they sit now, looking at the tennis courts. “No matter what’s happening between Mom and me, I don’t think she’d say she regrets this.”

  “Regrets what?”

  “Our forty-two years together.”

  “Oh, Dad. How could you even think that?”

  A representative from the Community Center steps out onto the porch, with paperwork for them to sign. Lily removes her credit card, but it’s too late: her father has already paid the bill. “Come on, Dad, I asked you.”

  “Indulge me,” he says. “Leo was my son.”

  “And he was my brother.”

  “Parents like to pay for their children. It’s written in the genes.”

  Maybe so, she thinks, but they’re her genes, too, and she’d have liked to do this for Leo, if only this once.

  Now they’re back inside the center, in the game room, which is housed in an alcove on the first floor. “Look at this,” her father says. “If the grandkids get restless, we can send them down here.”

  On the shelves are piles of books and board games. Angelina at the Fair, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Bears, Bears Everywhere!, Junior Monopoly, Let’s Go Fishing, Scattergories, Apple to Apple. Down the steps is a foosball table, and Ping-Pong, air hockey, a soda machine, a VCR. A sign is tacked to the wall that reads FOUL LANGUAGE AND ROUGH PLAY ARE NOT ALLOWED. They’ll have to remind the grandkids of that, too.

  Out front again, they settle onto the bench facing Walker Street. A blond boy in a tank top sticks a pinwheel out of a car, and it lights up momentarily in the heat. In the rear of a station wagon a poodle paces, around its neck an American flag.

  “I’m sorry Malcolm can’t be here,” her father says.

  “I am, too.”

  “Mom and I have always liked Malcolm. I don’t know if we’ve ever told you that.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “It’s not because we haven’t felt it.”

  Lily’s quiet.

  “It’s just that to tell your daughter you like her boyfriend is to imply that you could just as easily not like him. I’ve always thought praise was a double-edged thing.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “And you’re such a private person.”

  “Why?” she says. “Have I ever refused to answer your questions?”

  “Not refused, exactly …”

  “But?”

  “You make it known when things are off limits.”

  “Such as?”

  “If you’re going out at night and I ask about your plans, you’re likely to say, ‘I’m getting together with a friend.’ As if to ask you anything more specific would be an intrusion.”

  “You can ask me what my plans are.”

  “Okay,” he says, “what are your plans?”

  “My plans at the moment should be obvious. I’m sitting in the heat in this horrible dress.”

  “Oh, Lily, it’s not horrible.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Come on,” he says. “Help me along here. You’ve caught me at a sentimental moment. Or a weak moment, at least. I’m feeling bold. I’m asking you about Malcolm.”

  “You want to know if I’m happy?”

  “You probably think I’m not entitled. Not when what’s happening between me and Mom.”

  “You’re no less entitled than you ever were.”

  “Well, are you happy?”

  “Yes, Dad, I am.”

  He stares out at the traffic. At the edge of the lawn, a boy is playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on the French horn, and now a car moves slowly along the street, the driver pressing on his horn, as if trying to play a duet.

  “And now is when you ask me why we haven’t gotten married. Why we’ve decided n
ot to have children.”

  “But I can’t ask you that when I haven’t been much of an advertisement for it myself.”

  “For children you’ve been an advertisement. At least, I hope you have.”

  “But not for marriage.”

  “Dad,” she says, “you and Mom were married for forty-two years, most of them happy from my perspective.”

  “From my perspective, too.”

  “And if Leo hadn’t died …” She even can’t finish the sentence.

  His gaze bores past her, out into the distance where the sun is beating down. “Mom’s right, you know. It’s easy for me to cast her as the bad guy, but I haven’t been able to talk to her. I’ve become a workaholic, and I’m not even working anymore. A few months ago when we switched to daylight savings time, I forgot to adjust my watch and I didn’t discover it until Thursday. Thursday!” he says. “What kind of life am I living that I can block out the rest of the world for days at a time and not even realize it’s going on without me?”

  “Dad …” She touches her hand to his jacket sleeve.

  “There’s a shame in all this.”

  “A shame in what?”

  “There’s the shame at having failed at something big—at the biggest thing I know of. And there’s the shame at having let down my family.”

  “Oh, Dad. You haven’t let us down.”

  A hawk flies over them, holding something in its mouth. A fire truck rumbles past them. “Look at you,” he says. “You’ve gotten me to talk about myself when I was trying to talk about you.”

  “You wanted me to explain why Malcolm and I aren’t married?”

  “Not explain,” he says. “That makes it sound like I require a justification. I’m asking for a reason, which is something different. There are reasons for everything, presumably.”

  “It’s actually quite simple,” she says. “I don’t want the state involved in my love life.” He’s right, she tells him—she’s a private person—and whatever else, weddings are so public. If she and Malcolm were to get married, they’d do it alone, with a justice of the peace, but even that she doesn’t want to do. It just seems—she doesn’t know—silly. Not for everyone, but for her.