The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  As to the prohibition against engaging in festivities for a full year, he believed this was contrary to the prevailing rabbinic view, which was that it was forbidden to overdo mourning (thus, he noted, one mourned for only a single hour on the seventh day of the seven days of mourning), and he wrote that I should consider myself excused from this obligation.

  The last time I’d been to his old neighborhood had been when I was teaching in New York, I said to Seana, and Max’s apartment house had still been there. In fact, I’d been surprised at how little things had changed in thirty years. The houses on his block were the same ones that had been there the first time I’d come to Brooklyn with him, and though there were a few more locked gates across building entrances and alleyways, and though ethnicities had shifted—the people who lived on his block were mostly West Indian, not Jewish, Irish, and Italian the way they’d been when he was growing up—everything else had seemed pretty much the same. On Flatbush Avenue, the Dutch Reformed Church and its cemetery, where he’d hung out with his friends when they cut classes, had seemed in good shape, and a few blocks away, the building that had housed his synagogue was still there, though it had become home to a Pentecostal church. Most of the old movie theaters along Flatbush Avenue—the great picture palaces of the twenties and thirties—had survived, though none showed movies anymore, many were boarded up, and those that weren’t boarded up had become vast indoor flea markets where West Indians bought and sold everything from incense, dresses, and mouse traps to canned goods, lawn chairs, and auto parts.

  “But what do you think has changed, Charlie?” Seana asked.

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Tell me what you think has changed,” she said. “Please.”

  “Max is gone.”

  “What else?”

  “We’re going there together.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “And the part I don’t get?”

  “Me,” Seana said. “What’s changed is me. Although I may look and sound like the Seana you’ve known—same Jeanne d’Arc hair-do, same apostrophic chipped tooth, same haunting eyes, same brilliant chip-on-the shoulder wit—I’m essentially a new woman.”

  “Really?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  “No.”

  “But you are curious, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Charlie—be a sport,” she said. “Ask me how I’ve changed. And it’s not just our being together, or my deciding to see my family again, though they’re part of it. But be my straight man and ask me how I’ve changed.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So listen, Seana, I was thinking about what might have changed in the neighborhood where you and Max grew up, and it occurred to me to wonder about how maybe you’ve changed.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “As I was saying, I’ve been thinking that what’s changed most of all is me.” She drew in a deep breath. Then: “I want children, Charlie.”

  “You have me,” I said. “I’m a child.”

  “I’m serious. I’ve decided I want to have children.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s all you have to say—‘Oh’—? Did you hear what I said? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “But…”

  “‘But aren’t you too old,’ the man asks,” she said quickly, then answered her own question: “Probably. Still, we’re blessed—or cursed—you choose—with remarkable genes in my family. Caitlin—my oldest sister—had all her children, four of them, in her late thirties and early forties. My cousin Maggie had her first child at forty-three, her second and third at forty-four and forty-five. My mother had me—the family’s pre-eminent ‘Oops!’ baby—when she was forty-two.”

  “But you’re forty-three or forty-four, and…”

  “I’m almost forty-five, thank you very much, and I’m certainly not going to mess with all the fertility crap they put young women through these days, but I really would…”

  She stopped, unable to go on. I started to reach over to take her hand, but decided, and not just for safety’s sake—we were at New Haven, and were turning off the highway—to keep both hands on the steering wheel.

  “Are you okay?” I asked when we came to a stop at the bottom of the exit ramp.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “So I guess what I’ve been trying to say in my lame way is that I think I made a mistake once upon a time—took a wrong turn somewhere—and that it’s probably not the kind of mistake that’s correctable.”

  “Like me with Nick?” I said.

  “Something like that,” she said. “Although he did get his wish—you see that, don’t you?”

  “See what?”

  “That he’s living nowhere now,” Seana said, “which according to him—to what you wrote that he said—is the place to be these days. Then too, it’s good to remember what Max used to say.”

  “What did Max used to say?”

  “That death is not an event in life.”

  “That’s not Max. That’s Wittgenstein,” I said. “Max never took credit for other people’s words.”

  “Still—Nick, or Max, or Wittgenstein—it remains true that I do wish I’d had children—that I still might have children, even though I know it probably can’t be.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter because what I’m doing, you see, is expressing a feeling in a Seana O’Sullivan way—in triads: me, you, a child. A Catholic triad, come to think of it, because if I can’t have a child, that makes the child a ghost.”

  “A holy ghost?”

  “Don’t get too smart with me,” she said, “because I’m riled now, and even though you may not be able to see them, flames are shooting out of both my ears at the moment. I’m expressing a regret, Charlie—a big, fat, fucking regret, which is something I’ve worked diligently to avoid—and I’ve chosen you as the lucky bastard with whom to share the news. Can you understand that?”

  “I think you’re angry with me because of a mistake you made.”

  “You bet. And I’m also remembering our conversation with Trish—that you feel the same way I do about having children.”

  “Maybe we’re twins,” I said.

  “And have been engaging in incest?”

  “An ancient tradition,” I said.

  She looked away. “Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “And also, while we’re on the subject, let me assure you I wasn’t proposing that we have a child together.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Well I was and I wasn’t.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” I said, “but it’s hard to have kids without having sex.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said.

  “Probably?”

  “Well,” she said, “since Max died—the last week or two anyway—we have become like an old married couple, you and me.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said.

  I drove into the station’s parking garage, where we’d leave the car the way Max and I had done when we’d go to New York together, and take a Metro-North train into the city. I found an open space, parked, turned off the engine. Seana unfastened her seatbelt, slid sideways, leaned against my shoulder.

  “But I have,” she said. “Truth be told, my dear young friend, it’s been a comfort to me, the way it was with your father—to live with a man I find attractive and with whom I feel safe, and part of feeling safe, despite all my words, published and unpublished, seems to lie in not having sex.”

  Bright winter sun—the light almost white—poured in through the large windows under the New Haven train station’s roof, and I said something about loving times like this—times when I thought of myself as being suspended between here and there.

  “It has been a gift,” Seana said, “the way we’ve been with each other since your dad died.”

  “For me too.”

  “I didn’t mean to lay my decisions on you, Cha
rlie.”

  “What decisions?” I asked.

  “Right,” she said. Then: “I care about you deeply. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you also know that I’ve never been a big fan of romantic notions of love.”

  “I’ve read your books.”

  “In fact, and I borrow from Auden here, I sometimes find myself believing there’s no notion—no Western notion, anyway—that’s been responsible for more misery—not to mention bad poetry—than the belief that a certain vague, quasi-mystical experience called ‘falling in love’ is something every normal man and woman is supposed to have.”

  “I agree about the poetry,” I said.

  “Don’t make light of what I’m saying,” she said. “Please? I’m being serious in a way I’m not used to being.”

  “I’m not making light of what you said—I’m just disagreeing with you. Auden notwithstanding, I guess I’m still a romantic the way Max was…”

  She turned away from me, and we didn’t talk for a while. I watched students come and go, with their backpacks, Yale-blue scarves, and rolling suitcases. At the end of our bench, a young couple—tall black girl, stocky white boy—were kissing playfully, nibbling on each other.

  “Maybe we could adopt,” I offered.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Not as much fun, though.”

  “There are lots of healthy children—orphans—in Borneo. When I considered staying on there—making it my home—I thought about adopting one of them.”

  “I read your story,” Seana said, “and there’s nothing in it about adopting children. Who would have taken care of them when you had to be away? Tamika? Jin-gen? Amanda and Alicia?”

  “I said I thought about it. I didn’t say I had a plan.”

  “Why adopt if you could marry and have your own?”

  “Look,” I said. “It was just a passing thought, and it was probably smarmy-romantic and unrealistic, like a lot of my ideas. Save-the-Children, right? But what I did realize—this hit home when I had to imagine what Yu-huan might have to go through—when I knew what others like her did go through—I realized that having kids wasn’t about what I felt, or what I needed.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I mean, give me some credit for understanding that having kids is about them and not about me.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Charlie?”

  “Children don’t ask to come into the world.”

  “So?”

  “So I knew women—here, not there—who, when they talked about having kids would drive me crazy with the way they’d go on and on about becoming mothers—about how much they looked forward to the experience of being a mother.”

  “You never heard me talk that way, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up about it. I told you before, I would have made a very good mother.”

  “And, according to what I heard before, you think you still could be.”

  “Damned right.”

  “But come on, Seana. Talk about being romantic and unrealistic—and about driving yourself crazy with what probably can’t be.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I get the point. You’re right, and I’m right, and we’re both right.” She shrugged. “So maybe, like you, what I need is a plan.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So let’s make plans, you and me,” she said, her eyes bright again, as if she’d just thought of something mischievous, and she began talking about how her mother and sisters might react to seeing her again. They’d be sure to ask us to stay over, and if they did, where would we sleep? She giggled at the prospect of bringing me—a handsome, young Jewish boy—home for a sleepover, and I asked if she might be under the spell of an incipient form of Irish Alzheimer’s—if bringing me home wasn’t just her way of acting out on old grudges.

  “Ah, you really are smart, Charlie,” she said. “Max often talked about how smart you were—‘shrewd’ was the word he sometimes used, ‘shrewd if innocent’ his operative phrase. He talked about you a lot, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Whenever he sent me a letter, he’d report on what you were doing, and what he said each time you moved to a new place, or changed jobs, or had a new girlfriend, was that in his opinion you were only at the beginning of your potential.”

  “My potential as what?”

  “He was proud of who you were, Charlie, not of what you did.”

  “And if he knew about Nick?”

  “He’d be even prouder. Give him some credit for being a man whose values you come by honestly.”

  “Such as?”

  “What you told me he said about loss and no loss.”

  “Still—ridiculous fact—I am a murderer,” I said. “Max never killed anyone, as far as we know.”

  “According to my reading of your story, you might be a murderer,” Seana said. “There’s some essential—and intentional—ambiguity in the way you tell that part of the story.”

  “Is that what excites you about me—that I might have killed someone?”

  She roughed up my hair. “Oh Charlie, my little rascal—my little Raskal-nikov,” she said. “You really are something, aren’t you, the stuff that spins around in that pretty head of yours.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “But what’s weird is that I feel almost nothing about what I did.”

  “If you did it.”

  “And no guilt I’m aware of. No regrets. I don’t find myself wishing Nick were still alive.”

  “Who does?” Seana said. “Not his father. Not Trish certainly.”

  “Never Trish.”

  “Which reminds me,” Seana said. “I took the liberty of making a copy of your story and sending it to her—a way of thanking her for our time there, and a way for the three of us to remain close to one another.”

  “But I never said you could—”

  “It’s just a story, Charlie, though it’s a good one,” she said. “Lots of sweet ambiguity—some of which, like whether you were or were not drunk the night of Nick’s death—may remain a mystery forever.”

  “You noticed the disparity—between what I said and what I wrote,” I said.

  “I pay attention to you, Charlie,” she said. “But do you remember what I said, about how sweet it would be if you could transpose the way you talked into a voice that could talk the same way—an equivalent—but on the page?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, you’ve done it,” she said. “Beginner’s luck maybe, but it gives me leave to tell you what I think, which is that it was your father’s secret wish that you become the writer he never was. That’s what his tag sale was really about. You see that, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “He had no knowledge—no inkling—that I’d show up that morning, but I think he knew that setting out his wares would lure you home.”

  “You don’t think it was you—him writing me with the news that you were living with him that did the trick?”

  “No.”

  “What about him maybe wishing I’d come home and fall in love with you, so that after he was gone, the two of us…”

  “Good try, but I think you’re changing the subject.”

  Seana was looking past me, and I turned, watched an elderly man, his head and ankles wrapped in brightly colored scarves, wheeling a shopping cart across the waiting room floor. The man took a clear plastic bag of what looked like garbage from the cart, and stuffed it into a mail box.

  “As far as I know,” I said, “I never wanted to be a writer the way he did—or the way you did.”

  “Could have fooled me. Because you have something neither of us—me or Max—have: the ability to turn the stuff out without worrying every word and sentence to death.”

  “You worry things?”

  “Stop,” she said. “And think about the difference. Max lived past the proverbial three score and ten, and published one good, somewhat thin novel, and two short, serviceable
literary studies. I’m forty-four—almost forty-five—and all I have to show for myself so far are two weird, shamelessly successful novels, but you—you sit down, and in ten days, with people coming and going—strangers, relatives, old friends—you knock out something Max and I would have been proud to put our names to.”

  “But I wasn’t writing fiction,” I said. “I wasn’t making things up.”

  “Could have fooled me,” she said again.

  “Well maybe I did make up a few things here and there—embellish my memories—but what you believe about his secret wish—you’re not saying it just to make me feel good?”

  “What would make you think I’d want to make you feel good?”

  The overhead PA system clicked on, a voice announcing that our train was ready for boarding. We picked up our bags, walked toward the escalator, then down and along a tunnel and up again to where the train to New York City was waiting.

  A few minutes after the train left the station, Seana took a manila envelope from her overnight bag, and handed it to me.

  “A gift,” she said.

  “From you?”

  “From Max.”

  I opened the envelope, withdrew a manuscript. Under the title—A Missing Year—there was a hand-written note:for my son, Charlie, from his loving father Max

  “Wasn’t this on the list you gave me—the title of one of the stories you asked me to choose from, my first night home?” I asked.

  “Yes. So it’s one story neither of us will have to write,” Seana said. “It’s fairly long, and I want to take a nap, so why don’t you read it while I grab some Z’s, and we can talk about it later.”

  “But if he’d already written the story, why…?”

  “Shh,” she said, placing a finger against my lips. “Later, please. I’m bone-tired. Also, I adore the sound and motion of trains—the rattling and rocking and clanging, plus our reflections hanging out there in the air on the other side of the window. I think I’ve always loved being on-my-way as much as you love being between-here-and-there, so be a good boy and give me a kiss good night, and we’ll talk after you’ve read the story, okay? But think about this, Charlie—a thought that may surprise you, given what I said before: that if there is such a thing as love, maybe it shows itself forth in stories and in who we choose to tell them to—in the way we exchange stories of our lives with others…”