A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  Jean asked, ‘What are you people talking about?’

  Bill, in his reasonable, explaining voice: ‘The old woman who lives there was lying on the sofa when we came in.’

  ‘I don’t want to live like that.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying you should,’ Nathan said. ‘These are two different things. There’s the old woman who lives there, who by the way struck me as being perfectly on the ball. And there’s the apartment. You’re not buying her life.’

  Liesel shook her head in frustration, while looking down at her feet. ‘I’m not buying anything.’

  ‘If you don’t want to live there,’ Jean said, ‘you don’t have to live there. Nobody’s going to make you.’

  Even she couldn’t tell to what extent she was taking her mother’s side to get back at Nathan for something. ‘I don’t understand why you’re angry,’ he told Liesel. ‘You’re the one who wants to move to New York.’

  ‘Nobody’s angry.’ Bill was in a good mood – somehow it cheered him up to hear other people arguing. ‘Okay,’ and he clapped his hands: ‘Where’s apartment number two?’

  It was one of those rapidly changing late summer days, more like September than August. Sunny one minute, and almost cloudless, but then the blue sky took on a pearly sheen, a kind of shadow fell on the air, and even though it didn’t feel warm, you started to sweat. People in the street wore coats or T-shirts. The broad pavements had damp patches that showed up darkly on the yellowish concrete. Shops looked busy, especially on Broadway, and the outside tables of the restaurants were half-full. But as soon as you crossed Broadway, heading towards West End Avenue, the foot traffic thinned out, a kind of architectural quiet descended.

  On the way Cal woke up and started to cry. Dana fussed over him, bending down so that you couldn’t see his face, but the noise kept coming.

  ‘Does he have a dummy?’ Jean said, standing over them.

  ‘He used to, but we took it away. About a month ago. We thought, maybe that was why he wasn’t talking more.’ Dana stood up again, looking strangely at a loss; her son screamed almost passionlessly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to take him home. He eats better in his own high chair.’

  But it wasn’t easy saying goodbye – Bill had walked twenty paces ahead again, Nathan and Liesel were talking, and eventually Jean stepped in.

  ‘People, people,’ she said. ‘Cal is hungry. Dana is going back.’

  Nathan looked at her humorously. ‘You don’t want to see more real estate?’

  With his dark Jewish complexion and high forehead, he looked like Paul, but older and heavier, taller and more expansive. Less inward. His mouth was wider, his lips were thicker, his hair was longer. The sleeves of his jacket rode up on his wrists; they were covered in dark curls. Sometimes Dana received from him a very faint indication of what it might be like to talk to him at a party, if they didn’t know each other.

  ‘I know,’ Jean said, ‘she’s a pervert,’ and offered to keep her company.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Dana told her.

  ‘Well, I want to. I can catch up with the others.’

  So they retraced their steps. Jean, with her head down, kept blowing the hair out of her eyes, or brushing it away. This wasn’t a policy decision, but she disliked spending money on haircuts. It was like a tax on women, she couldn’t believe how much some of her friends paid. Mostly she cut it herself, but the truth is, she cared a little more about these things since the beginning of her relationship with Henrik. And after she booked her flight, she thought, Liesel or Susie can cut it for me, that will be a nice thing for us to do.

  Cal was still crying. It amazed Jean how long he could keep it up, and Dana confessed to her: ‘You get to a point where you think, maybe it’s easier if you just admit that you’ve got a difficult child. But that’s hard to do because you … because you love them so much.’

  ‘He’s not so bad,’ Jean said. ‘He’s just a kid.’

  ‘But in that case, the problem is you. It means you’re just not very good at coping.’

  Jean didn’t respond at first. It was like scratching somebody’s itch, when they won’t tell you exactly where the itch is. You do your best. Eventually, she said, ‘We’re the ones who are dragging him around. None of this is for him.’

  ‘Sometimes I think he’d rather be with Inez. You know, she really loves him – she buys him presents about once a week. The thing he sleeps with is from her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put so much pressure on yourself. Of course, he loves you. I mean, that’s a battle you’re always going to win.’

  ‘Some of the pressure is just, you know, around your family, I want to show him off. And then he’s either asleep or crying. And because he doesn’t see you very often, you think, that’s what he’s like. But maybe if you saw him with Inez.’ There was a pause. ‘These are the stupid thoughts I think.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us.’ Jean was kicking the ground as she walked, scuffing her rubber soles. ‘I feel bad sometimes,’ she went on, ‘about the whole tone of our … what we get up to as a family. Like, what we consider a reasonable way to pass the time. Looking at apartments. Not just that but the way we talk about these decisions. I mean, Liesel has worked hard, she earns good money, why shouldn’t she buy a place in New York, or not buy it, if that’s what she wants. But even so, I sometimes feel like, none of us has a clue. They should see how some of my friends are living. Even I’m basically a lodger with a bedroom in somebody’s house. It’s a nice house, but still, I have a little corner of the fridge. And then you go around some apartment on the Upper West Side worth one point something million dollars, and you don’t want to live there because there’s an old woman on the sofa. I don’t know.’

  Dana said, ‘Do you mind pushing the stroller? Cal might stop complaining if I carry him.’

  ‘Of course. I’m a jerk.’

  They stopped in the street and Dana took her boy in her arms, digging her hands under his sweaty back (he’d been sleeping for over two hours), feeling the hot skin under his T-shirt – while half in sleepiness and half in protest, he arched his back away and then bent so violently towards her he almost hurt his neck on her shoulder. But after that he quieted down and Dana felt like she had plugged into something. Heat and energy flowed into her again.

  ‘Everybody I grew up with grew up in nice apartments or big houses,’ she said. ‘Nobody thinks about it.’

  ‘Well, it drives me nuts. Part of that is just stupid teenage embarrassment, which I should get over. But it’s more than that, it’s like we’re totally out of touch … By the way, there’s something else I want to make clear. If Henrik would have more kids, I would have his kids. I’ve got nothing against kids. I want to have them.’

  ‘You don’t have to make that clear for me.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to think I was trying to make any kind of a comment, about you guys or Nathan or Susie …’

  ‘I didn’t think that.’

  They were crossing 86th Street by the concession stand, but there were cabs coming in both directions, so they waited for the light to change. Even then, a few cars turning off Broadway pushed through the line of pedestrians.

  ‘Does he want more kids?’ Dana asked, stepping onto the pavement on the other side.

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. We keep meaning to set like a date for talking everything through, but it always seems to both of us like a date from hell, so we keep pushing it back.’

  They had reached the awning outside Dana’s building – an arch led through to the courtyard garden, and doormen stood by the gate to help and greet. One of them saw Dana and tipped his cap. He was eating a sandwich, and somebody said something to him from inside the office, which made him turn around.

  ‘Do you want me to come up?’ Jean said. ‘How are you going to push the stroller?’

  ‘It’s okay, Cal can walk from here.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’

  ‘Go, it
’s okay.’

  She lowered her son to the ground, waiting for his legs to take the strain, and felt him adjust and release her. Sleepily, almost blindly, he stood on his own two feet. Jean bent down to him again, and noticed for the first time his plaid shirt and brown cords and basketball boots. He looked like a college freshman; his hair stood a little on end.

  ‘See ya later, kid.’

  Cal stared at her quietly and then opened his mouth, to show her something. There were bits of what seemed to be strawberry jam all over his tongue.

  ‘I gave him a fruit thing in the stroller to shut him up,’ Dana said.

  ‘What are his words, what can he say? I live so far away and I don’t even know him at all.’

  ‘He can say bye-bye, he can say bat ball. Which means, play tennis. He can say gachas, which means porridge in Spanish. Inez is trying to teach him, maybe this is why … They say bilingual kids speak later. Say bye-bye, Cally.’

  But he didn’t say anything and just looked at Jean, who had to decide when to turn away. Walking back to join the others, she had the feeling that some expression of sadness or love was on the tip of her tongue.

  At Broadway, waiting for the lights, she took out her phone and started writing a text to Henrik. As his assistant, she could text him risk-free, even if he was on holiday with his wife and kids – so long as she kept the tone semi-professional. Keeping that tone, and managing to sneak in something intimate, something she wanted to communicate, turned out to be difficult but not impossible. Apartment hunting for my parents in New York. It’s like going to the zoo for us, she tapped out. But this isn’t what she wanted to say, which was just missing you NOW at the corner of 86th Street, something standard and sentimental. And even what she had written struck her as wrong on two counts – a betrayal of her family, which she didn’t feel; and also, for the same reason, too intimate, in a boring conversational way. Henrik was probably at dinner, or sitting in the garden, having a drink, and his wife would reach over and look at the text, and see that. The lights changed but Jean deleted each letter before crossing over.

  *

  She caught up with her family on West End Avenue, waiting for the realtor. They were a few minutes early. Liesel was sitting down on the low wall of a flowerbed outside the building and talking to the two girls. When Jean came over, she said, ‘Maybe Jean can tell you another story. You know mine already.’

  But Julie wouldn’t be put off. ‘We want stories about the olden days.’

  Liesel looked at her in mock exasperation. ‘You know, there is a famous German play that begins like this. A son says to his father, Aber ist Euch auch wohl, Vater? Ihr seht so blaß. Which means, But are you feeling okay? You look so pale. And when I was a girl, older than you, Julie, but not much, we used to joke that instead of saying what he says, the father answers, Not really, and drops dead.’

  ‘Don’t you feel well, Liesel?’ Julie asked.

  ‘I feel fine. Like a fish in water,’ she said. ‘Wie dem Fish im Wasser, but I have run out of stories.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a story about the war. It could be a story about Nathan.’

  ‘Jean can tell you those.’

  ‘I can you tell those,’ Jean said, sitting down next to her mother. ‘He was a very annoying brother. He was always right.’

  The awning over the entrance cut out a wedge of shade, but at an angle – mother and daughter sat in shifting sunshine. The sky was clear and then filmy, the light kept changing, delicate shadows of branches and leaves brushed across the pavement, blurred and disappeared and then came into sharp focus. Dutch elm disease had recently struck and the trees were very young. But the building itself looked between-the-wars: brownish yellowish brick, a vague kind of harvest motif cut into the stone over the doorway, stained glass windows on the ground floor. It took up the whole block. Jean could see her brother at the next corner, with a hand in his front pocket, walking and talking with Bill.

  ‘How old were you when Nathan was a kid?’ Julie asked.

  ‘I don’t know what that means. You’re a kid a long time. Some of that time I didn’t even exist.’

  ‘I mean when Nathan was as old as me.’

  Something about the question surprised Jean, the tone or mood. Her niece sounded childish again; their personalities go through these endless jumps and shifts. ‘How old are you, Julie? Ten? When Nathan was your age, I was like Cal. Maybe a little younger.’

  ‘And did he like you?’

  ‘He was very angry with me,’ Liesel cut in. She made a face. With her brown skin and white hair, her expressions were very vivid. ‘And I’ll tell you why he was angry, because up to that point the boys outnumbered the girls, and when Jean was born, it was two against two.’

  ‘That’s not a good reason to be angry. That doesn’t sound like Nathan.’

  ‘Daddies weren’t always daddies,’ Jean said, and Liesel made a clicking sound between tongue and teeth – she had thought of something.

  ‘I can tell you a story about him that isn’t really a story, but it’s about his name. It’s about why we called him Nathan.’

  ‘Okay, tell us.’

  The girls sat on the broad front stoop of the entrance, at Liesel’s feet. Margot had taken the old piece of candy out of her pocket and was trying to unwrap it. The wet sugar had stuck, and the foil made a sticky crinkling sound that annoyed Julie.

  ‘There’s a play called Nathan der Weise,’ Liesel said, ‘which means Nathan the Wise.’

  ‘Is that because you wanted him to be wise?’

  ‘There are several reasons we thought of it, when we were thinking about names.’

  Liesel tried to explain the story but couldn’t exactly remember it. The plot was over-involved, about a Jewish father and his adopted daughter, and the Christian knight who saved her, and the sultan who needed money. Everyone turns out to be related in the end but that’s not what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to say something about cultural difference, and why tolerance could be difficult. Intolerance wasn’t just a kind of mistake or a form of ignorance. Julie had been raised to think things through for herself; Nathan never held back when she asked him a question.

  But she wasn’t as good as Nathan at stripping a problem down to the bare bones, so that anyone, even a ten-year-old girl, could think about it. Liesel kept getting lost in tangents. She felt there was some connection between the play and their lives, her own marriage, for example, and the battles she had fought with Bill’s parents, to accept her. This is what she wanted to talk about, but Julie made it difficult for her – she could be very literal.

  ‘Why did you fight with Bill’s parents?’ Julie asked her.

  ‘We didn’t fight exactly, but we didn’t get along. Bill’s mother wrote my mother a letter, when we got engaged. She tried to persuade my mother to persuade me not to marry her son. But this is how she started it, My dear Mrs Karding, which Mutti found very insulting.’

  ‘Why?’

  The girl was digging in again, and Liesel felt tired. She had stayed up late the night before, waiting for Jean – dozing and waking on the sofa, listening for the elevator. Even when she went to bed at last she found it difficult to drop off. Bill always got up early. Also, you forget how exhausting it is, with kids, explaining everything from scratch; you lose the energy for it.

  ‘It’s very formal. In Germany, you would write something like …’

  ‘But Bill’s mother didn’t know that. It’s stupid to get upset about something like that.’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t just upset about that. It was the whole letter. My mother thought, any woman should be pleased for her son to marry me.’ And then: ‘She thought I was a catch.’

  ‘So why didn’t she want him to?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bill’s mother?’

  ‘Want him to what?’

  ‘Marry you.’

  ‘Because I’m not Jewish.’

  There was a pause while Julie took this in, and Liesel went
on, ‘You have to see it from Essie’s point of view. Bill’s mother was called Essie, by the way, short for Esther. Which I always thought was very funny, because it’s so German. Peter Petersen, Jürgen Jürgensen and Essie Essinger.’

  ‘Why is that funny?’

  Julie never understood why grown-ups found certain things amusing; she tried to make them explain but they usually couldn’t. Nathan had taught her a couple of Woody Allen jokes, and sometimes Julie repeated them, but she didn’t understand these either. You see this watch? My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed. You look so beautiful tonight I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter. Whenever she said these lines she watched eagerly for a reaction, and afterwards, if somebody laughed, she said, what, what, pleased with herself but still puzzled.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Liesel told her. ‘But I can see it from her point of view, too. It was only twenty years after the war, and she thinks her son is marrying the daughter of a Nazi.’

  ‘Was your father a Nazi?’

  ‘Of course not. But it’s not that simple either. He was never a member of the Party, he never voted for Hitler. But he was an engineer, and when the war started, he worked for the German Navy. But I don’t think Essie cared much about these distinctions.’

  There was almost no traffic on the street, and the neighborhood reminded Liesel of Berlin – wide empty avenues, tall apartment blocks, crowded with windows, mostly unadorned, so that the buildings seemed expressionless. In her twenties, as a young history student, she lived in Prenzlauer Berg. In those days almost nobody owned a car, but her brother managed to get hold of an Opel Olympia and would pick her up and drive them to Wannsee. This was a few years before the Wall. They swam and lay on the beach; he brought a picnic. Sometimes their cousin came along. The idea of having this conversation then would have seemed incredible to her. You didn’t talk about the war.

  ‘It wasn’t just her, it was Bill’s father, too. They thought that if Bill and I got married, our children wouldn’t be considered Jewish – that they wouldn’t consider themselves Jewish. Bill said to them, we’ll raise them Jewish, it’s part of the deal. But in the long run, his parents were right. I mean, how Jewish do you feel?’