“And Mother just died. Your timing is brilliant.”
I bit my lip, my eyes welling up.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asked.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“No, it’s not. I made you cry. So why not tell me I’m a shit or something like that?”
“Because it’s me who’s the shit here.”
“No—it’s you who’s the sad man in the room. From what I’ve been hearing, my impression is that you’ve been this way for years. Unless, of course, I’m wildly off-beam.”
“Anything but that.”
“So I’m right. You’re sad.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me. Sad.”
Johannes thought about all this for a moment. Then said:
“Mother always thought that about you, too. It always bothered her. ‘He’s so smart, so talented, so clever, he should be happy.’”
“I was happy. With her.”
“Yet you chose sadness.”
The comment hit me like a slap across the face. But I didn’t flinch. I just shrugged and said:
“Yes, that is exactly what I chose.”
The bartender kicked us out a few minutes later. Once on the street, Johannes said that he wanted to show me where his bookshop would be. We walked south to the next block. There was a storefront—a former salon, now empty, a “For Rent” sign in the window. The place had two large windows and, as I saw squinting in through the dirty window, seemed spacious enough for a good-sized bookshop.
“Tell me again how much they want a month?” I asked.
“Nine hundred.”
“That strikes me as pretty reasonable for a neighborhood like this one.”
“Yes, it’s a good deal. And I have some carpenter and painter friends who would do all the refurbishing stuff very reasonably. Of course, the main outlay would be stock. Because, as I told you, I plan to make this not just the best bookshop of its kind in Berlin, but in Germany as well.”
“And you need around fifteen thousand to get the whole place up and running?”
“If I can ever get a bank to listen to me.”
“I’ll give you the money,” I said.
Johannes looked at me with care.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Totally.”
“Even though the whole thing might fail?”
“It won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you’re the brains behind the operation.”
“There are a lot of people in this city who would think because it’s my idea it’s doomed to fail.”
“I’m not one of those people.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“Then we won’t call the fifteen thousand a gift. We’ll call it an investment.”
“And one which I plan to pay back with interest.”
“That would be nice, but it’s not essential.”
“It’s absolutely essential.”
“Fine by me then,” I said.
“Can you even afford fifteen thousand?”
“I have some savings.”
“But you’re hardly a rich guy.”
“Let me worry about the money.”
“You’re doing this out of guilt, aren’t you?”
“That’s part of the equation, yes.”
“What’s the other part?”
“She would have wanted this.”
Silence. Johannes lowered his head. Tears welled up in his eyes. Tears that he wiped away.
“I miss my mother,” he finally said.
“And I certainly know how much she loved you.”
For the first time since we’d met, Johannes looked directly at me. And said:
“You know what she told me the night she died? ‘I was always convinced that life was essentially unfair, especially during all those years that you weren’t with me. Then I got you back, and life never struck me as unfair again.’ That from a woman dying thirty years too young, from a cancer inflicted upon her.”
“You made her life, Johannes.”
“So did you.”
* * *
I returned to Maine the following evening, picking up my car in Boston and driving northward up the darkened interstate. Fresh snow had fallen while I was away, but the guy who plowed my driveway had also cleared out the path leading up to my door. As I stepped inside, the thought struck me that I hadn’t really slept in three days. Along with another reflection: it is still so hard coming home to an empty house.
I dumped the dirty laundry from my travel bag into the washing machine. I stood under the shower for a good quarter of an hour, trying to wash away the ten hours of flying and the three-hour drive. I poured myself a very small whiskey and checked my emails. There was one from my daughter:
Are you in the country, Dad? I never know. I could drive up from college tomorrow if you feel like having dinner somewhere.
I wrote immediately back:
Let me make it easier for you. I’ll drive down to Brunswick. What’s the name of that Italian place you like so much?
We arranged a date for seven that evening.
There was also an email from Johannes:
Talked with the real estate agent today—and I’m signing lease papers for the premises next week. Talked to a lawyer. He’ll be drawing up a contract between you and the company that I’m forming—with myself as the sole shareholder—to open the store. Everything about your investment will be clearly laid out—and I’d prefer if you ran it by a lawyer . . . preferably one who speaks German . . . when you receive it. Like I said the other night, I will only accept your money as an investment . . . and also if you promise me you’ll come back to Berlin for the opening of the bookstore.
“I’ll certainly be there for your opening,” I wrote back. “And if you feel like ever giving me a call—just to chat—here’s my Skype address.”
“I’m on Skype, too!” he wrote back. “No cost to either of us—and I can now plague you for hours about the latest Manga stuff I’m going to force you to read.”
“Plague away,” I wrote back. “And know that you can call me whenever. Day or night. Because, like you, I don’t sleep much.”
But that evening I did sleep straight through the night. Nine seamless hours. I woke to one of those rare midwinter days in Maine. A hard blue sky. The mercury well below freezing—bracing but not polar. The snow still pristine. The world appearing well ordered and unusually rational on this bright, peerless morning.
I caught up on correspondence. I punched out a few pages of a long piece I was writing on a journey to Mauritania that I had undertaken just before Christmas. Then I pointed the car south and headed toward the Italian joint in Brunswick that Candace so liked. She was already waiting for me when I arrived. She didn’t see me at first when I came in, so I caught a glance of her alone at the table: very poised and elegant, dressed simply but stylishly in a black turtleneck sweater and jeans, clearly intelligent and attractive, yet lacking her mother’s angular severity. I could see that she was hunched over a book, chewing on the end of a pencil.
“Is it a book worth reading?” I asked as I approached her table. She looked up and gave me the biggest of smiles—albeit one that was tempered by some underlying worry.
“Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain. Great Foreign Literature in Translation. I have an exam on it next Monday.”
“And it’s very long, but good in its own imperious way.”
“‘Imperious.’ I like that.”
“Steal it then,” I said, sitting down. “Can I tempt you with a glass of wine?”
“You know I’m still a few months underage.”
“I’ll take the fall if the cops arrive.”
“My father the outlaw,” she said with a smile.
“Hey, I remember when I was at college here, the drinking age was eighteen. But that was in the decadent seventies, when we weren’t so obsessed with the micromanagement of all social behavior
in this country.”
“Spoken like a true libertarian.”
“Spoken like a man in his fifties.”
The waiter showed up and we ordered a half bottle of Chianti.
He glanced at Candace, then shrugged and went off in search of the wine.
“You see, we fooled them,” I said.
“Well, a glass is my limit.”
“Mine too, as I’m driving back home tonight. And I’m just in from elsewhere.”
“Now you know I’ve been in the country for a good month and a half.”
“That must be a new record for you.”
“I happened to be in Berlin.”
“Your old stomping ground,” she said. “You seem a little down tonight, Dad. Something happen there?”
“Lots.”
“You want to share it?”
“I do, but not just yet.”
I could see my daughter studying me. In that always interesting, always analytical ways of hers, she was also quietly sizing up the situation. Then she smiled and said:
“No problem, Dad. And yeah, when you’re ready to tell me . . . of course, I want to hear all about it. But you do look . . . I guess ‘pensive’ is the word I’d use.”
“Pensive about sums it up. But when I was coming in tonight, I saw you looking . . . well, ‘pensive’ is the word I’d use, too. And it wasn’t just due to Thomas Mann, was it?”
Our wine arrived. We clinked glasses. I could see Candace formulating how to tell me something difficult—as she had that look that crossed her face when she was struggling with a big decision. Glimpsing her in the middle of this internal conflict all I could feel was an enormous stab of love for my daughter—as I saw again that she was now beginning to edge into adulthood and all its attendant complexities.
Staring down at the empty plate in front of her, she said:
“Paul asked me to marry him.”
Paul was Paul Forbusch. A very nice, very thoughtful guy from upstate New York who was in her class, whom I’d met on several occasions, who majored in philosophy and religion, and was never less than kind and enormously loving toward my daughter. He even told me how much he adored her once when they came and spent a weekend at my house—and I didn’t do the Shocked Dad thing when they shared the same bed in my guest room. When Candace went upstairs ahead of him, he said:
“You know, sir, that your daughter, Candace, is—”
“Paul, we’re not in a Jane Austen novel, so you can call me Thomas. And I do know that Candace is my daughter.”
“Well, all I wanted to say, Thomas, sir, is that Candace is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
“That’s a very sweet thing to say, Paul.”
“And I think she’s also about the smartest person I’ve ever met.”
Part of me immediately wondered if—due to my many absences during her childhood and the rather frosty relationship between her mother and me—what Candace saw in Paul was decency and stability. Admirable qualities—but not exactly the most interesting ones.
“When did this proposal happen?” I asked her.
“Around three weeks ago.”
“I see.”
“I know I should have talked with you about it earlier.”
“Not at all. You needed time to think it through before talking to me.”
“I haven’t spoken to Mom yet about it.”
“Well, are you pleased? Surprised? Horrified?”
“All of the above. You know, Paul’s just been accepted at Yale Divinity School. He’ll be getting a master’s, maybe even a doctorate. And he’ll also be eventually ordained as an Episcopalian minister.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“I hear irony behind that statement.”
“Look, Episcopalians are happily not Pentecostalists. And he is a nice guy. But . . .”
“I think I love him, Dad.”
“Well, that’s kind of essential if you are going to marry him. But look how you qualified the statement with ‘I think.’ And sorry . . . I know I’m not jumping up and down and telling you ‘Fantastic.’ It’s just . . .”
“He doesn’t cut it for you, does he?”
“Like I said, I think him exceptionally nice and thoughtful. And I know he adores you.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
“Well, you know I put fifteen thousand dollars aside for you as a graduation gift. My hope is that you’ll take it and vanish somewhere for a year. Go travel across Southeast Asia, then head to Australia. Get yourself one of those working visas they give to people right out of college. Spend half a year on the Barrier Reef or working on a newspaper in Sydney. I’ve got a few connections there. Then come back—or not—and start figuring out what your next move might be.”
“In other words, don’t get married.”
“In other words, find your way in the world first. Don’t hem yourself into a corner. Especially when it might not turn out to be the corner you want to be in.”
“Paul has told me the same thing. He knows about the fifteen thousand you’re giving me. He knows you’ve encouraged me to go traveling, telling me that his certified public accountant father would never have been so cool. He wants me to do the trip. But then he wants me to come back and marry him.”
“That’s very progressive of him.”
“I’m hearing irony again, Dad.”
“I think Paul is right. Head out into the world. Travel. Have adventures. Then if, a year from now, you do want to marry him—”
“I think I want to marry him now.”
“Ah.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I am never disappointed in you, Candace. Never.”
“But you think I’m rushing into something without giving it full thought. The thing is, I’ve given it a lot of thought. Paul is someone who respects and cares passionately about me. Who won’t try to make me into something that I don’t want to be. Who will give me plenty of latitude to be myself.”
“That all sounds very positive. It’s just . . . why not take him up on his offer to let you knock around the world for a year?”
“And maybe meet some surfer dude on Bondi Beach who will show me a good time and convince me that the world is bigger than that offered by a future Episcopalian minister?”
I smiled and told myself: shut up now . . . no more advice. Instead, I said:
“I would never tell you what to do with your life, Candace. Just be sure that this is the man you really love, that’s all.”
“I am sure. I know I said ‘I think’ before. But that was more an anxious turn of phrase, as I thought if I told you definitively, ‘Yes, I know he’s the one’ you would have . . .”
“It doesn’t, in the end, matter what I think. It matters what you feel. That’s it. And if you truly believe this is it . . .”
“You’ve felt that, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I have.”
“But not with my mother.”
“Did she say that?”
“As a matter of fact, she did. And she also said she didn’t ever really feel it with you either.”
“Well, your mother can be most direct.”
“But she also said you would never talk with her about ‘it.’ This woman.”
“Maybe because, had I talked with her about ‘it,’ I might have upset her.”
“Because she would have known that you were once so in love with somebody . . .”
“. . . that I still grieve for it.”
“But that’s so sad.”
“No. That’s just life. Anyway, if things had worked out with that other person, there would have been no you.”
“So I’m the recompense?”
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Candace.”
She reached over and briefly clutched my hand, whispering, “Thank you.” Then adding:
“But you’re still so alone, Dad.”
“That might change.”
“Only if you
want it to.”
“We all have to voyage hopefully, Candace. Even when we think all is lost, we still have to try to convince ourselves that life can shift gears—and that it is still laden with possibility.”
“So if I marry Paul because I so love him and then ten years from now it all goes wrong and I find myself stuck with two kids and no money . . .”
“I promise not to say ‘I told you so.’ But say that does happen. Say it does fall apart. Say you do have two young children as well. Everything is about interpretation. You can decide all doors are closed to you. You can decide that crisis is a synonym for opportunity. You can sit in some suburb and be sad. You can take your two kids to another country and start again. That’s the great tragedy for so many people. They forget that life is such a flexible construct . . . that, by and large, you choose the limits and the horizons.”
“Not everyone is as free as you are, Dad.”
“I’m hardly free. In fact, I’m anything but free.”
A few hours later, I drove my daughter back to her apartment off campus. As we pulled up, I could see Paul sitting in a rocking chair in their living room, studiously hunched over some very big book.
“Can we drop up and see you this weekend?” Candace asked.
“I’d like that very much.”
“I am going to marry him, Dad.”
Before I could reply, she leaned over and gave me a hug, then left the car.
I waited until she was inside the door before putting the car into gear and pointing it north back home. As I pulled away, I pondered the fact that my very wonderful daughter timed that final declaration with a quick exit from the car. That saddened me—but I also got the gist of her action. We’re close, Candace and me. But she’s twenty-one—and she has to act out her own life now. Perhaps Paul will be the best thing that happened to her: a man who loves her utterly, who gives her the latitude she needs, but also makes her feel wanted, adored, whole. Or perhaps he will become a self-righteous, persnickety, controlling little pedant who makes her waking hours hell. Or perhaps it will all turn out to be very pleasant and middling. The fact is, we are always taking chances in life. Always convincing ourselves of a scenario, a way forward, that we hope will make things right for us, or at least will make this short little span of time we’re given seem worthwhile and somehow complete.
The Moment Page 58
