World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

“Do you want me to come get you?” Wyeth says. “I could catch the next flight to Boston.”

  “Oh, Wyeth, you can’t do that.”

  “I could be at the airport in less than an hour.”

  He could, no doubt. Threading his way through traffic, finding seams between cars where none exist. Once, watching Wyeth drive, Thisbe thought, Who said you can’t fit a camel through the eye of a needle?

  But it wouldn’t work. He’d cast a pall over the event, her gallant horseman come to rescue her, and, she fears, she wouldn’t feel rescued. Wyeth would arrive with his cheer and good intentions and he’d be received like a burglar who’s jacked open the door, a cold draft coming into the house. For an instant, she longs for an age she never knew, when you lived where you grew up and you died there too, when the world that lay beyond you was only for the imagining and you waited for a letter from the boy you loved, up late in his bedroom mooning over you, sending you flares in the middle of the night. Back in Berkeley, after Calder has gone to sleep, she likes to sit beside Wyeth while she reads a book, listening to him speak on the phone. Wyeth talking. It’s the background melody to her life. “Wyeth,” she says. “I want to move in with you.”

  “You do?”

  “If you’ll still have me, that is.”

  He laughs. “Why wouldn’t I still have you?”

  “I thought maybe you met someone while I was gone.”

  “Thisbe, you’ve been gone for less than seventy-two hours.”

  “You’re a fast worker,” she says. “At least you were with me.”

  She knows what he’s thinking, and what he’s good enough not to say. That she was a fast worker with him, too.

  “Have you told Calder?”

  “Not yet,” she says, “but he’ll be thrilled. He’s your biggest booster.”

  And there he is, Calder, at the top of the stairs, looking down at her in the basement. Someone has given him a cookie. Just as likely, he’s given one to himself. Though she’s been known to give herself a little pre-bedtime treat, too. It’s ten o’clock at night, and he has a sugar high; with any luck, he’ll sleep on the plane.

  “Wyeth?” she says. “Can I change my mind about tomorrow? Will you pick me up at the airport?”

  “I’ll be waiting at the gate,” he says. “I’ll be the guy in the chauffeur’s hat holding the lease.”

  And she’ll be the woman with the suitcase waiting to sign it. It’s Calder’s bedtime.. It’s past bedtime for them both. She can hear voices on the first floor. And he’s walking toward her now, Calder, come to greet her in his footed pajamas, making his way down the stairs.

  14

  It’s not even seven-thirty when Clarissa hears a noise downstairs. A door opens and shuts. She rolls over into the crook of Nathaniel’s elbow.

  “It’s the milkman.” Still asleep, and Nathaniel is already poking fun at her, playing on her credulity and hauteur. He used to try to convince her that when he was a boy there was no milk in the supermarkets of Nebraska City; it was all delivered by the milkman. No telephones either, so he was forced to communicate through a Styrofoam cup extended by string to his friend’s house.

  Awake now, Clarissa gets out of bed and turns on the computer.

  “Checking e-mail?”

  She nods. She hasn’t checked e-mail the whole holiday. She needs to know what she’s supposed to worry about.

  “Does that mean I have to check e-mail, too?” If the world can be divided between those who check e-mail whenever they can and those who check e-mail only when forced to, Nathaniel is squarely in the latter camp. He turns on the computer with anticipatory regret. Every time he thinks, What am I going to be asked to do now? He puts on his boxers, and now out pops his head through the hole in his T-shirt. He’s sitting half-clothed on the bed.

  Clarissa turns off the computer and lies back down beside him. “The world hasn’t ended, as far as I can tell.”

  Noelle, meanwhile, is already awake in the room next door. Her flight back to Israel leaves this evening, and she hasn’t begun to pack. Just in time for their return, the boys’ internal clocks have adjusted to the States. They lie stone cold atop their sleeping bags as Noelle traffics in and out of their room, picking up their laundry and a couple of stray toothbrushes, removing their clean clothes from the dresser drawers and depositing them in their suitcase. There’s a stain on the floor (Could it possibly be jam? She told them not to eat outside the kitchen), and she goes into the bathroom and brings back a washcloth and now, on her knees, she tries to rub the stain out, but it’s caked like tar to the wood.

  In the bathroom, she runs the faucets in the sink and tub. The boys have dirtied them too; clumps of hair have gathered along the porcelain. Her sons are related to her, no doubt. And to her parents as well. The Frankel family: had anyone ever seen so much hair? “You guys are keeping Drano in business,” Leo used to say. “And Liquid-Plumr too.” Though he was one to talk. He and his sisters were clogging up the drain themselves; the whole family was keeping plumbers in business, liquid and otherwise.

  Noelle folds her clothes and places them in the suitcase; at this point, she doesn’t know what’s dirty and what’s not. She’ll have to wash it all when she gets back to Jerusalem. She packs Amram’s clothes as well. She’s tempted to leave them here; they’re not her responsibility. Though they’re certainly not her parents’ responsibility, either.

  In the shower, she shampoos and conditions her hair, then sits down on top of the closed toilet and clips her fingernails and toenails. It’s so rare that she can attend to her small bodily concerns, so rare that she can be in a bathroom at all without feeling like an egg timer is ticking on the sink, without having a husband or a son—often several of them—banging on the door and demanding that she vacate.

  Outside, the sky promises more bad weather. Finally, yesterday, the rain stopped, but now, on July fifth, it’s set to resume.

  She hears voices downstairs, so she steps out into the hallway. She leans over the banister and whispers, “Shhhh.” She wants her boys to sleep as long as possible; they have a twelve-hour flight to endure. But the talking continues: a low-grade hum. She thinks she hears her mother’s voice, but she can’t make out what she’s saying. Her hearing has failed her once more. Though before long, everyone she knows will catch up to her. Life is one long process of losing your hearing. She’s read that there are cell phones now whose ring can’t be heard by adults. High school students leave their phones on during class because the teacher won’t hear them. Only teenagers can hear them. Teenagers, mice, and dogs.

  She puts on her shoes and heads downstairs, and when she reaches the landing she sees it’s not her mother, but Gretchen, her grandmother, sitting primly in the living room in the brown armchair, her feet crossed, her hair up in its signature beehive. Lily once said that she never saw Gretchen unprepared at a moment’s notice to be transported to the Philharmonic. That’s how she looks now, wearing pressed gray slacks and a white button-down shirt with the collar open. Around her neck hangs a string of pearls, and she has on matching pearl earrings, delicate as fish eggs. Her skin is creased like a ripened pepper; the tendons in her neck dance as she talks. She has on a little blush and a dab of lipstick, looking as if she is, in fact, expecting to attend a concert.

  “Grandma,” Noelle says. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Is that how you greet me, darling?”

  “Grandma.” She bends down to kiss her. “It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “How did you get here?”

  “By car.”

  She looks at her watch. “It’s eight in the morning, Grandma. You’re saying you got up at five and drove here yourself?”

  “I most certainly didn’t.”

  “Then how did you get here?”

  “I was chauffeured.” Gretchen looks up as she says this, and Noelle, following her gaze, sees that it’s trained on the chauffeur himself, who has walked in from the kitchen holdi
ng a glass of tea for Gretchen and a plastic cup filled with milk for himself. “Good morning, Noelle.”

  “Amram,” she says, and she’s so livid she’s struck mute.

  “Nice to see you,” he says, and he sits down on the couch.

  Amram is wearing the same jeans he had on two days ago, only they appear to have spent the whole time crumpled; they bear an uncanny resemblance to elephant skin. He had a day’s growth of beard when she last saw him, and now he has three days’ growth, which, Noelle knows, makes him think he looks rabbinic, but to her it makes him look like a hoodlum. He’s wearing the same blue button-down shirt, but it, too, appears to have been folded over on itself, and it has a small mustard stain across the middle. Even his black velvet yarmulke, which is bobby-pinned as always to the side of his head, looks as if it’s been left in the gutter.

  Noelle would like to wring his neck, and that’s no figure of speech. She’s tempted to put her hands around Amram’s throat and tighten them in a vise grip. She’s not a violent person—she can’t remember having hit anyone since she was a child—but it’s all she can do not to punch him in the face.

  He’s sitting across from her with his cup of milk on his lap, looking in his own soiled, slovenly way as if the world owes him no explanation for what has come to pass and he owes no explanation in return. Noelle, standing above him on her parents’ Persian rug, clenches her fists, and the nails cut into her palms. “Amram,” she says, feeling a line of spit come out from between her front teeth, “you look like a bum from the Bowery. Is that where you just came from?”

  “Actually, I just came from the Upper East Side. It’s where Gretchen lives. On Fifth Avenue.”

  “I know where she lives.”

  “It’s where I spent the last couple of nights.”

  “You what?” Gretchen doesn’t like having guests in her apartment; she finds them an invasion of her privacy. The only exception was her grandchildren, whom she used to let stay over, and even in their case she would tire of their company after a day and insist on packing them up. Noelle has an image of Gretchen’s apartment, the vast open space of the living room, her gaze traveling past Indonesian rugs, past coffee tables and side tables and end tables, the sheer expanse of surface, those lovely walnuts, cherries, mahoganies, and oaks whose job was to sustain lamps and little glass figurines, in some cases serving no function at all, meant to do nothing besides be there, entire forests cleared for Gretchen’s sumptuousness. “You didn’t sleep in my grandmother’s apartment.”

  “I most certainly did.”

  Gretchen, still sitting primly in the armchair, says nothing to contradict him. She’s simply drinking her tea, looking ahead expressionlessly toward the porch, where a blue jay is pecking at the feeder.

  And Noelle realizes it doesn’t matter where Amram slept. He could have slept in Gracie Mansion, for all she cares. He could have spent the last two nights at the White House itself, installed in the Lincoln Bedroom as President Bush’s personal guest, and it wouldn’t make a difference to her. “Excuse me, Grandma, but I need to talk to my husband alone.” She takes a step toward Amram and now she has grabbed him by the arm and yanked him up from the chair. Some of his milk spills as she does so, but she doesn’t stop. She has him by the shirtsleeve and he’s following her, out through the porch door and into the garden, where the clouds are heavy and it has started to mist, and where, standing beside her mother’s azaleas, she gets up in his face, standing so close she can smell his breath, a revolting combination of pizza and spearmint. She’s actually poking him in the chest.

  “Would you get off me?” he says, stepping back from her.

  “No,” she says, “I won’t get off you.” She takes another step toward him and is poking him once more. “Do you have any idea how long you were gone?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, Noelle. I didn’t come back here for a lecture.”

  “Well, you’re going to get one whether you came back for it or not.”

  Amram retreats another step and almost trips over the garden hose. He’s staring at her irately.

  “You’ve been gone for two days, Amram,. Forty-three hours, to be precise. That’s long enough for me to file a missing persons report if I’d been foolish enough to file one.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “What else would you like me to say?”

  “How about ‘Thank you’?”

  “Thank you?” she says. “Thank you for what?”

  “For bringing Gretchen back with me. Because if you think it was easy, you have no idea.”

  But Noelle doesn’t care if it was easy. She doesn’t care if Amram slung Gretchen over his back and carried her the hundred miles up the Taconic Parkway. “Where in the world have you been?”

  “I told you,” he says. “New York.”

  “Our flight leaves this evening, Amram. I was prepared to fly home alone.”

  “And I was prepared to let you.”

  A hoe is toppled in the garden soil, and she picks it up and leans against it. Though now, too agitated just to stand there, she grabs the hoe and starts to dig some dirt, going at it violently, piling it into a pyramid next to her mother’s rosebushes. She could take the hoe to Amram, she really could. She understands for once the logic of gun control, how it’s dangerous to have a weapon in the house, though in Israel all the men serve in the army reserves and there are guns everywhere you walk on the street. She’s glad she doesn’t have a gun right now.

  She jams the hoe into the ground. “You missed my brother’s memorial, Amram. You were supposed to say kaddish. That was your one job, and you screwed up. I had to say it for you. And don’t tell me a woman isn’t supposed to say kaddish.”

  Amram just stands there, his arms folded across his chest, as if to make the point that he hasn’t said anything.

  The tree branches in the garden bulge in front of her. Above her, the clouds crack and break apart. “Why didn’t you call?”

  Amram is silent.

  “Did you even consider it? I was afraid you might have been killed.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  “I almost wanted you to be killed. At least that would have explained why you were missing.”

  “Noelle—”

  “Just stop.”

  Again he tries to speak, but she won’t let him. “And it’s not just me who was worried. The boys were scared sick. I had to lie to them—tell them you were calling and you were coming back. The rest of the family was scared, too. My parents, my sisters.”

  “Your parents and sisters couldn’t have cared less.”

  “Amram,” she says, “tell me where you were.”

  “Jesus, Noelle. How many times do I have to say it? I was in New York. Would you like an actual zip code?”

  She glares at him.

  “What difference does it make where I was? I’m here now, and I brought your grandmother back with me. I convinced her to come, which is what everyone wanted. The whole family together one last time. Because it’s not going to happen again, don’t you understand?”

  “Why did you go there in the first place?” And the thought occurs to her: Amram drove down to the city to plead for money. “Did you ask Gretchen for help?”

  “What?”

  “Did you request money, Amram?”

  “And if I did?”

  “If you did, I’ll kill you.”

  Amram laughs. “Since when did you become so pure? You’re always talking about how when Gretchen dies—”

  “Amram, did you?”

  Sweat beads on Amram’s forehead. His throat pulses, like a toad’s. “I told you, Noelle. The only reason I went down there was to bring your grandmother back with me. So you could have your last hurrah.”

  “Hurrah?” she says. “Is that what you think this is? Hurrah? Hurrah?” She claps her hands hard, once, twice, and the sound reverberates through the garden. “You wanted a hero’s welcome, is that it?” That’s the problem, she thinks. Amram wa
nts to be a hero, and what she’s trying to tell him, what she’s been trying to tell him for years now, is that if she wanted a hero she’d have married one.

  But before she can say anything more, she can see through the porch window the rest of her family come downstairs and discover Gretchen in the living room. They’re hugging her, telling her how glad they are she’s here, and now the boys have come out into the garden and are embracing their father, saying, “Abba, we missed you, we missed you so much!”

  Now Noelle’s sisters and parents have emerged into the garden, too, and are greeting Amram with an enthusiasm Noelle isn’t accustomed to and can’t abide. They’re thanking him for having driven Gretchen up to Lenox. “How in the world did you pull it off?” David says, and Amram, putting on a show of mock sheepishness, simply shrugs.

  Now even Nathaniel has walked over and is pumping Amram’s fist, the fact of which clearly pleases Amram—he has on, Noelle thinks, an enormous and stupid grin—and he’s saying, “It looks like Gretchen has met her match,” and Lily is saying, “I never thought anyone could convince Grandma to do anything,” and Gretchen, throughout it all, is sitting in the living room sipping her tea, calmly observing the ruckus.

  But Noelle isn’t through with Amram. “Everyone back inside,” she tells the boys, though she means the command for her whole family, and now it’s just her and Amram alone again next to the pile of dirt she’s dug.

  Amram takes off, around the bend of the house.

  “Where are you going?”

  He reaches the garage, where the electric door is up, and he steps inside and retrieves a tennis racquet.

  “That’s my mother’s, you know.”

  “So what, Noelle. I’m not stealing it.” He drags out a bucket of balls and pushes the button so the garage door closes.

  “What in the world do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m hitting tennis balls.” He removes a couple of balls from the bucket and swats them in succession against the garage door, making a dull thudding sound, over and over.

  “You’re going to break that door, and then what will you do?”