To Inga and Dick
‘All happy families are alike …’
Anna Karenina
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Whenever Paul qualified for the US Open…
Friday
The rain continued fitfully overnight…
Saturday
Michael’s apartment had a wide though impractical…
Everybody came together for early supper at Paul’s place…
Sunday
Jean woke up early, with jet lag.
The nearest subway stop was at 81st Street,
It’s about a half-hour train ride to Yonkers,
Susie had no special love of Manhattan,
The fountain in the courtyard was leaning slightly…
Monday
When Paul woke up, too early, he could tell…
Nathan had a meeting at nine o’clock;
At the sign for Mets-Willets Point, everybody started…
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
Whenever Paul qualified for the US Open, his parents, his big brother, his two sisters, their various kids, traveled to New York to watch him play. ‘It’s like Christmas,’ his mother used to say. ‘Our family reunion.’ She was German, from Flensburg originally, right on the Danish border, though she had lived and taught in America for the past forty years. All of the Essinger children called their parents by their first names, Liesel and Bill.
The first week of the tournament ran through the end of August; the second encroached on September. Most of the Essingers had academic jobs and couldn’t afford to miss the start of term, but Paul rarely made it into the second week. When he was twenty, playing as an amateur, he reached the third round and afterwards dropped out of Stanford to turn pro – he wanted to concentrate on tennis. The next year he lost in the quarterfinals; his ranking hovered briefly in the twenties. But that was as high as it got, and he spent most of his career snaking and laddering between the fifties and the low one hundreds, depending on injuries.
His mother, who had no real interest in sports, was basically puzzled by her son’s athletic success – it seemed just another part of what it meant to have American kids, kids who were somehow foreign to you. His father was both inordinately proud of and at the same time bitterly disappointed by Paul’s career. Bill had spent his own childhood hitting, dribbling, catching, striking, putting balls, around the park, the court, the diamond, the fairway, the green, but it had never occurred to him that one of his children might have an international ranking. And yet what that ranking meant is that half the time you saw him play, in the big tournaments, you watched him lose.
‘I’ll probably retire after this one,’ Paul had told his father on the phone. ‘I was lucky to get through the qualifiers.’
‘See how you feel,’ Bill said. ‘That’s not what you need to be thinking about right now.’
‘There are very limited possible outcomes to what happens next week. They don’t depend much on what I say to you.’
It was always a burden, getting tickets, finding places for his family to stay. His girlfriend Dana bore most of the brunt. It didn’t help that they weren’t married, which she thought made the Essingers look down on her, especially after their son was born. A worry that Paul always responded to in the same way: don’t be crazy. But it fed Dana’s other anxieties, about her career, or lack of one, about her past. Another thing that didn’t help: the apartment she found for them belonged to her ex-husband.
*
Paul had asked her to pick up his parents from the airport, but they were landing at five, which meant if she brought Cal along, well, it was feeding time at the zoo – you can’t expect a two-year-old to sit in traffic. Inez, their nanny, took Friday afternoons off, so Dana and Cal could ‘hang out’ together, which sometimes meant pushing him to that playground in the Park near 86th Street and sometimes showing him off to friends, in coffee shops or their apartments. Dana looked forward to these afternoons all week, even if, two years into motherhood, she was still a little nervous around Cal. Secretly she would have liked to get rid of Inez, though she liked Inez, too – she was so … not just patient, but full of energy. Dana could be one or the other. What am I supposed to do all day was a thought she had on a lot of days. But she didn’t get rid of Inez, because … oh, who knows. Because Paul could afford to keep her. Because she suspected Inez was better at looking after Cal than she was – better for Cal, that is.
‘Can’t they get a cab?’ she asked Paul.
‘Bill won’t pay for a cab.’
‘So you pay.’
‘He won’t let me pay. You know that.’
She was lying in bed in running shorts and a T-shirt, which is how she slept in summer. Their seventh-floor window looked out onto the central courtyard of the apartment complex. Paul liked to sleep with the air conditioning on, a throwback to his Texan childhood, but she always opened the window anyway – and could hear the New York sounds coming in. Traffic noises, tires on the wet road (the night was still sticky after an afternoon shower). Even the distant consoling laugh-track of a neighbor’s television. One of the doormen called out something in a happy voice, probably to a guy delivering food.
Paul, with the pillows stuffed behind him, messed around on his laptop; his face looked greenish in the backlighting. Usually about a week before a tournament he started to turn inward. He would read when they were in the room together or stare at his computer or play with their son instead of talking to her. She sometimes thought he preferred Cal’s company – not just loved him more, which was understandable, but preferred his company. Maybe she did, too. But that was only because Cal gave you some kind of response.
‘So why don’t you pick him up?’ she asked.
‘Marcello’s thing. They’re having a memorial for him before the Open starts. What he meant to American tennis, at some mid-town hotel.’ When Dana didn’t say anything, he said, ‘It’s not like I’ll be having fun. You know what these things are like. It’s basically a publicity exercise. The USTA is making a film about him. But I really liked the guy, he meant something to me. Sometimes you have to show your face. I can pick up a take-out on the way home.’
‘It’s you they want to see,’ she said.
‘They’ll see me when I get home.’
‘Fine.’
He gave her the look he gave when he was refraining from saying something that maybe struck him as petty or mean. ‘All right, I’ll pick them up.’
‘It’s just that I don’t know what to do about Cal.’
‘Leave him with Inez.’
‘Friday is her afternoon off. And she’s flying to Tempe to see her mother.’
‘What, now?’
‘She’s having her pacemaker replaced.’
‘On the weekend?’
‘On Monday morning. Inez wants to spend the weekend together beforehand, in case something goes wrong. I mean, it’s a routine operation. This is just a kind of superstition. But I’m not someone who will get in the way of one of my, I don’t know, employees …’
‘I just don’t want my dad making Liesel get the train to Jamaica, and then the Long Island Rail Road and then another train at rush hour, with all their stuff.’
‘So they should get a cab.’
‘He won’t. It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. I’ll pick them up.’
‘Of course I’ll do it,’ she said.
She switched off her bedside lamp, and the imperfect darkness of the city evening came into focus in the window. She lay on her side and looked out across the airspace of the courtyard; maybe a third of the windows showed a light,
in funny patterns like SAT answer cards. The way she had said ‘employees’ upset her slightly – this is the world she grew up in, where people talked conscientiously about their staff. She heard her mother’s voice, discussing their cleaner; as a kid it drove Dana nuts. And she knew what Paul thought. You hire people to do a job, you pay them to do it, end of story. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. But he didn’t have to spend time with Inez. You have to be friends with these people, or pretend to be friends at least, and that makes it awkward when you pay them or make decisions about what they can or can’t do.
‘It’s not just picking them up,’ she said. ‘Do they have to stay in Michael’s apartment? I’d rather pay for a hotel.’
‘What’s wrong with his apartment? He won’t even be there.’
‘You know, Paul.’
She turned over to look at his face, in the green glow. His hair was cut short, what he called his jock haircut, to hide a receding hairline. But he didn’t much care, and when he wasn’t playing, he let it grow long in tufts around his ears. The skin under his eyes seemed vaguely sun-damaged, not freckled but slightly abraded. He spent a lot of time in the sun. But he still looked like a sensitive boy, the kid who speaks only after raising his hand. It took her six months, when they started dating, to realize that his shyness was just a form of self-control. He didn’t have to be shy.
‘Michael’s got a great apartment. Let’s all move into his apartment.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ she said. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird? Please. Turn that thing off. I want to sleep.’
‘They don’t care.’
‘You think that’s true, Paul, but it’s really not. You think your family is above all that, but they’re not. Your father has opinions about these things. Your mother has opinions. They don’t mention them to you, but they let me know about it, believe me.’
‘Come on, Dana,’ he said, and shut his computer, and put it on the floor by their bed, and turned around again and tried to pull her towards him. She was almost as tall as he was; her legs were just as long. ‘What are you feeling so anxious about? I’m the guy who has to go out there and lose.’
‘That’s what I don’t like. That’s what you don’t realize. It’s harder on the rest of us.’
‘I’m sure it must be,’ he said.
FRIDAY
The rain continued fitfully overnight, then all day long the city steamed and gathered heat. Dana got caught up in the general weekend exodus – people trying to get out early. Fallen branches and leaves had collected on the hard shoulder of the Parkway; the waters of Meadow Lake looked almost sea-like. To keep Cal happy on the carride to JFK, she had given him a box of Graham crackers. This was his supper. He worked his way through them slowly and methodically but not very carefully. There were wet crumbs everywhere by the time they reached the airport: on his fingers, on his pants, on the seat and on the floor. She tried to reach round and clean up what she could from the driver’s seat, but it was no good. Her hands were sticky; the traffic kept pushing her along; she had to circle. When she saw Bill, she felt a little surge of anxiety and shame.
Not that Paul’s father would care much about the state of her car. He stood by a pair of suitcases, looking vaguely homeless, in his sports jacket and dirty chinos, in his running shoes. He also looked exactly like what he was: an econ professor. In the humid afternoon, the moustache of his beard curled over his lips. He stared right at her, and then past her, at the car behind her, and the car behind that one. She pulled over to the curb and even when she rolled down her window and shouted ‘Bill!’ he glanced at her for a moment with the baffled, almost angry air of a bumped-into stranger.
Then he turned around and called out, ‘Liesel, Liesel, she’s here.’ Liesel appeared through the glass doors, wheeling another suitcase, looking friendly and flustered. Bill said, ‘Let’s go, come on. I don’t expect she’s allowed to hang around.’
‘Even inside the air condition isn’t working properly,’ Liesel said. She had short gray hair, a round, handsome, very brown face; she wore a striped shirt and jeans and a juniper-red hippy kind of bead necklace, which Dana had found and Paul had given her for Christmas. ‘Hello, Dana. This is very sweet of you.’
‘You must get used to this in Texas,’ Dana said.
‘You never get used.’
Bill, bending his back and not his knees, lifted their suitcases into the trunk of the car – a Saab 900 turbo – then climbed into the backseat next to Cal. ‘Hey, Cal,’ he said to the boy, in his 1950s dance-show host voice. ‘What’s doing.’
Liesel dropped her handbag on the floor by the passenger seat. She sat down heavily and swung her legs in, one at a time. A year before she had had a knee replaced; now the other knee probably needed surgery too, but they were putting it off. When she was in, she gave Dana a smile of relief. ‘It’s cool in here.’ Her eyes were a little shiny with tears from the salt in her sweat. Dana, who loved her, almost felt her own tears rising.
Bill said, ‘Does Paul really fit in this car?’
‘Well, he sits in front.’
‘Even so.’
For some reason, the presence of strangers upset Cal, and he began to cry as they turned onto the Expressway. Bill tried to comfort him, he offered him a Graham cracker, he took off his watch and gave it to the boy, but Cal struck it out of his hands. Bill picked the watch up from the floor and started to clean up some of the mess – not just the biscuit crumbs, but other wrappers, empty juice cartons, raisins, old Cheerios and receipts. He had found an empty plastic bag and was putting them in it.
‘Oh, just leave that. I’m sorry,’ Dana said. So he did care.
‘It’s fine, why not make myself useful.’
Cal continued to cry, a steady, not very hopeful kind of crying, very sure of itself – as steady as rain on a gray afternoon.
Bill even tried to clean up some of the debris from Cal’s shirt and between his trousers and on the car seat. ‘Okay, buddy. It’s okay. I think he wants Mommy.’
‘He’s hungry,’ Liesel said. ‘I’ve got some chocolate.’
‘He doesn’t like chocolate.’
‘Every kid likes chocolate.’
‘Cal doesn’t.’
‘Well, he can play with the wrapping paper.’
Liesel reached in her bag and found a piece and gave it to Cal, who went quiet; Dana felt very slightly annoyed.
The traffic coming in had gotten noticeably heavier since she set out. There were cars backed up both ways, trucks inching along, people honking. Exhaust fumes hardly rose in the thick heat. Even the city skyline, which she could see in the distance, looked vague, worried by midges. Yesterday’s storms hadn’t cleared the air, there were more storms predicted over the weekend.
Bill said, ‘Is Paul out hitting balls?’
‘They’re having a memorial service for Marcello. That’s why he couldn’t come. He says he’ll pick up some food for us on the way home.’
‘He shouldn’t do that. I’ll go and get something.’ Bill was suddenly in a good mood. ‘I could go with him.’
‘I always liked Marcello,’ Liesel said. ‘All of these people exaggerate everything, but he didn’t exaggerate so much.’
‘You have a lot of luggage.’
‘Bill brought his work along.’
‘I don’t know how long we’re staying,’ he said. ‘If Paul makes it to the second week, we’ll cancel class. Who knows how many of these things he has left. I don’t want to sit around all day doing nothing. So I brought my work. I’m assuming there’s a space to work in this apartment.’
‘There’s space.’
Liesel said, ‘It’s very generous of Michael to let us use it. I don’t know what he likes. We brought him some Texas honey. It can sit on the kitchen counter, it won’t go bad. And if he doesn’t like it, he can throw it away.’
‘Really, he doesn’t mind at all. He’s hardly there. He’s one of these people with houses everywhere. When he comes to New
York he mostly stays in Long Island. Anyway, he’s not in New York now, he’s in – Sacramento. For some reason. He probably feels guilty towards me, I don’t know. He’s always been very generous to me. That wasn’t the problem. He doesn’t mind.’
They were coming up to the Triborough Bridge, the lanes spread out, and Bill began to take out his wallet, which was in his pants – he had to squirm a little to extract it.
‘Let me pay the toll,’ he said.
‘Please. I don’t even think about it. We’re on E-ZPass.’
‘How much is it? Five dollars? I’ll leave it on the seat.’
She had joined one of the queues and could turn around to look. ‘Please, it will just get lost.’ But he stuffed a bill into the backseat pocket. Cal had fallen asleep, which meant he’d be a nightmare later on. Paul would probably want to keep him up anyway. It was okay. She could let it go.
‘Look at this city,’ Bill said.
His father had grown up on the Lower East Side, then moved upstate after law school and marriage. But he sometimes brought his boys into the city, to catch a ball game, or see family; once or twice he took them along on business. And still New York stood in Bill’s mind for the larger, louder, brighter realism of childhood.
It was like entering a forest – your sense of scale began to adjust itself. All those warehouses, car lots, billboards and lanes of traffic. Some of the billboards worked like TVs, the images shifted electronically, you couldn’t take your eyes off them. They told you the weather, the time; people’s faces were blown out of all proportion. Not just movie stars, but local news anchors. He saw an advertisement for the History Channel. What was it like to look up at yourself on one of those things? What did it do to you? Earlier in his career Paul used to advertise for a brand of tennis ball. Sometimes they (he and Liesel, sitting at home in Austin) even saw their son on TV. It removed him slightly from them, from their sphere; it seemed to have an effect on Paul, too. It took something away.
Dana followed the signs to the FDR. She tacked into the far lane and waited in traffic at the 96th Street exit. Kids were playing basketball behind a tall chain-link fence. Bill said: ‘I got the feeling from one of our phone conversations that he’s not in a very optimistic frame of mind.’
A Weekend in New York Page 1
