A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘So who am I talking to here, who’s the boss?’ he asked.

  ‘This guy,’ Bill said, and put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder.

  *

  On the way downtown, Paul kept up an angry conversation with himself. The bit about the dishwasher was just stupidity – it had nothing to do with anything. He didn’t even get mad about it anymore. That was one of the things they had figured out. He loaded the dishwasher. But to parade it like that in front of his brother, like some precious detail, oh well …

  With his racket bag and gym bag, he took up a lot of room on the subway bench. People got on at 72nd Street, and he shifted the bags between his legs, feeling cramped. Like a kid, he wanted to make himself small. Part of the reason was … (the conversation kept going in his head) that he had mixed competitive feelings about his brother’s marriage. Nathan’s wife, Clémence, was French-Canadian, with an Egyptian father, and white and black hair she didn’t bother dyeing. She was eight years older than Nathan, a journalist who had covered the White House for years, first for Le Monde and later for The New York Times. Nathan met her when he was clerking in DC. When he got the Harvard job, she commuted from Washington until the kids were born. Recently, she had started teaching at the Kennedy School, but she had also written books and was an occasional talking head on the NewsHour and All Things Considered. Nathan was like the junior partner in a Cambridge power couple.

  Paul liked Clémence. She was lively and an excellent cook, she asked questions, she had endless energy, but there was also an undercurrent of family opinion (which he sometimes tapped into) that reacted against Nathan and Clémence’s air of ‘successfulness.’ This is what Jean called it. What’s the difference between that and success, he asked her once. ‘It’s like fullness of success,’ Jean said. ‘It’s like the style that goes with it. You can’t stop by their house without Clémence whipping up saffron chicken and palm artichoke salad and five other dishes, and everything served in beautiful bowls, and Nathan brings up a bottle of wine he’s been keeping for ten years in the cellar.’

  ‘That sounds terrible,’ Paul said.

  ‘But you know what I mean. When the phone rings, it’s a producer from NPR.’

  ‘You’re just jealous.’

  ‘That probably is what I mean.’

  Maybe they all were, a little bit. Sometimes the jealousy got in the way of their natural love but mostly it didn’t. There was a kind of protection he sometimes felt in Nathan’s company. Nathan had thought of most things; he had expert views – on real estate prices and pension plans, on the veil of ignorance and the categorical imperative. And partly what Paul wanted to communicate to him was just that you can’t understand my life as the end result of a lot of careful choices. That’s not the way it makes sense. Look at my relationship to Dana. The explanation for many things is what does it do and how does it work. But for some things the explanation is, this is where it’s breaking down. It’s a mess and maybe you don’t even have to understand it, you just have to get out of the mess.

  No, it’s not a mess, it’s not that bad yet. It’s just that you’re coming to the end of one career and have to figure out what to do next. These are perfectly reasonable and predictable feelings. Also, you’re basically misunderstanding Nathan if you think about him the way he presents himself to other people. You should know better than that.

  After 72nd, the local stops kick in. The train screeches picking up speed and screeches again, a minute later, metal on metal, fighting to slow down for the next station. The cars fill up, even on a Saturday afternoon. At Times Square, everyone gets off, everyone comes on. Paul stepped out at 28th Street, pushing his way awkwardly through the high turnstile, climbing the steps. It was good to get out in the air again, even in the shadow of high buildings. He could have taken a cab to the Club, but he liked to think of himself as a regular New Yorker. Also, he was his father’s son, he hated spending money on perishables, a category that in Bill’s mind included taxis.

  Almost three years ago, Nathan and Clémence and Paul and Bill and Liesel had sat in a bar overlooking West 27th, one floor up from a high-end travel and art bookshop. Paul walked by this bookshop every day on his way to the Club, the kind of place with antique globes in the window, restored mosaic floors, stained glass panels over the doorways, odd bits of old leather hanging from the walls. To get to the bar you had to pass through a shared corridor, go up some dark steps, covered in schoolhouse linoleum – one of those secret-style places you can find even in the middle of Manhattan. It was Nathan’s choice. Bill and Liesel were coming back from London, staying with Paul for a couple of days after visiting Jean. Nathan had a conference in New York, about technology and the law, sponsored by Cornell. Let’s all meet up, he said. I’ve got an hour or two presently unaccounted for on Saturday afternoon, before I have to catch my train.

  Dana was pregnant with Cal at that point and feeling too out of it to come downtown. But it surprised Paul when Clémence turned out to be there. It meant their nanny would have to put the kids to bed – they gave her the weekends off, and Nathan was usually a stickler about these things. Bill rarely drank unless you offered him champagne, not for any snobby reasons, except that he wasn’t much of a boozer but really liked champagne, even the cheap stuff. Nathan ordered a bottle of Pol Roger. What’s the celebration, Paul said.

  But there wasn’t really a celebration. Clémence said something like, I’m afraid we have some news, or there’s been some bad news. Afterwards, Paul couldn’t remember the word choice – he argued with Liesel about it. For some reason it bothered her. Paul’s first impression was, they were getting a divorce, it was amicable, and they wanted to go about it in a civilized way. He couldn’t explain why this occurred to him and it bothered him, too, in the aftermath, like a thought-betrayal. In fact, as Nathan explained, a few months ago he woke up functionally blind; he could see light but he couldn’t focus, and in one of his eyes he couldn’t even really see light. When he tried to get out of bed he also felt some resistance in his left leg, like waking up with pins and needles, but it didn’t go away. Nathan, it should be said, had a mild tendency to hypochondria; in low moods, his restless energy got redirected inward and turned into anxiety. But whatever had happened was serious enough that he cancelled classes, and when the kids were in school, Clémence drove him to the emergency room at Mount Auburn.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ Liesel said.

  ‘We didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Clémence said, ‘I told him he should call.’

  They were sitting on high stools pushed up against a long narrow table, everyone facing the same direction, which had its advantages. Nathan continued. The doctors put him on a drip and afterwards (he went home the next day) gave him a course of oral steroids; it was a Thursday morning when he went in, and by Monday he was back in class. The blindness was caused by something called optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve, but what the doctors were really worried about was MS. He was more or less in the window where people first get diagnosed. The fact that he had had what’s called a multifocal episode, with impairment in two separate areas of the nervous system, the problem with his eyes and the numbness in the legs, made it a pretty obvious call but MS is still not easy to prove, it’s really a collection of causes and symptoms. So they gave him an MRI to check for evidence of previous attacks – it doesn’t get called MS until they find some kind of history, they’re looking for progression.

  His tone was dry and neutral, he was trying to explain himself, to get the facts across. Paul thought, I guess all of these are coping mechanisms and for some reason the phrase came into his head, If you prick us, do we not lecture? Another minor thought-betrayal, but sympathy itself is a kind of heightened response, it’s a strong light that shows up little things, including details of your own reaction. What I would do is probably go out and hit balls.

  Bill said, ‘There’s nothing like this i
n the family, I mean, no history. Not that I know of. If that turns out to be relevant.’

  ‘The MRI looked pretty clear, the doctor said, in the top ten, fifteen percent of expectation. It’s technical, I don’t really understand, but what they’re looking for is damage to a kind of fatty sheath that protects the nerve fibers. The fat keeps out water, so they’re looking for water on the brain. This is how he explained it. I talked to him yesterday, that’s why we’re drinking champagne. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen again, it doesn’t really change the diagnosis. What they’re calling it is CIS, which basically means a single episode of MS. The relevant question is likelihood of progression. Some of the doctors you talk to seem to believe that more or less everybody progresses, we’re just not that good at reading the footprints yet. But I thought you should know anyway. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it goes away, but if it doesn’t there will be real repercussions for the kids, for Clémence—’

  ‘Just to be clear here,’ she broke in, ‘I’m not worried about me.’

  ‘There will be things you can help us with, which may involve some sacrifice.’

  ‘We don’t have to talk about this now,’ Clémence said. ‘It’s a good day. This is good news.’

  She had a very striking face, miscegenated, dark-skinned under the white and black hair, narrow and eager and pretty. She used to smoke and after giving up never stopped fidgeting – her hands tapped, she shifted her posture, she leaned forward and threw her head back, laughing. She picked at beer-bottle labels; she stacked coasters, she ate nuts. The bar table ran the length of the front window. Below them, at their feet, taxis slipped through the traffic, the streetlamps came on, the apartment or office block across the road presented the usual front, of lit and unlit rooms. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, dark at half past four. Paul had just come from the gym and felt drunk quickly, light-headed and somehow hard of hearing – like a radio with tinny reception.

  Liesel asked, ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Right now, nothing,’ Nathan said, and Clémence looked her in the eyes. With her white hairs and smoking wrinkles, she might have been Liesel’s contemporary, almost. They both spoke English with a faint accent; but there was also something else, something European, they had in common. ‘There’s nothing to do. But we wanted to let you know.’

  Paul stood up and put his arms around Nathan, leaning in from behind. As kids, they used to be very physical; they sat in the bath together, Nathan and Susie and Paul, and took it in turns to rub each other’s backs. Not Jean – she was still too young. Nathan briefly rested his hand on Paul’s fingers.

  ‘How’s Dana feeling?’ he said.

  ‘Okay. Pretty big.’

  Bill said, ‘Stan Murnau has a part-time arrangement at Boston College, where he teaches there one semester. I can talk to him.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything now.’

  ‘Well, let me know.’

  ‘Right now the decision we have to make is some of the doctors want to put me on medication, the kind they give you if you’ve got MS. The theory is you want to start early. But the treatment isn’t costless. I mean, there are side effects, these are strong drugs.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘A colleague of mine knows somebody at the Mellen Center. His background is really in statistics, he looks at the evidence base. We’re going to talk to him.’

  Afterwards, Clémence and Nathan took a cab to Grand Central, and when its tail lights disappeared around the corner, Liesel said, ‘We’re getting a taxi, too.’ Bill didn’t argue; Paul stood in the road to flag one down, and as soon as they slid inside it became clear to him that Liesel was extremely angry. Angry and upset, by the news and the fact that Nathan had kept it secret for over two months. The way they were told – opening a bottle of champagne, sitting in that fancy bar, the whole business. Bill said, ‘The champagne was because there was good news from the doctor,’ but he didn’t really try to talk her out of it, he let her go. Paul, sitting in front, wondered why he thought at first they were getting divorced, whether this was because on some level he wanted it to happen, and whether on balance, if they had been instead of … but you don’t have to make these kinds of choices, thank God. What you feel doesn’t really matter. And also, he felt all the usual things, too. Watching his brother go off, bending his long body into the taxi, a successful young man in a suit, you don’t think … but even the way he moved now suggested something … his clumsiness, which could dominate a room, the way he leaned into you when he walked. Paul thought of these as symptoms of … what his grandmother used to call a forceful personality. But maybe what they meant was something else. Frailty, his body didn’t always do what it was told. You’re reading too much into nothing. Nothing has happened. Don’t mention it to the kids, Nathan had said. I don’t want them worrying.

  And somehow, since then, nobody talked about it – it didn’t come up. Nathan was good at … not keeping secrets, but acting on his own recognizance. You are, too. He informs when necessary, and Paul didn’t expect whatever he had revealed to his brother that afternoon to go any further.

  Somebody said to him, standing outside City Gourmet Market, ‘Hey, you.’ One of those come-ons that makes you think a sales pitch is coming next – or a Greenpeace leaflet from a college-age cutie with an army backpack. The woman was pretty but closer to forty-five; she wore a Burberry trench coat loosely over a dress. A fan, or maybe somebody he should know from the USTA. A sponsor’s wife; somebody. He couldn’t think.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. They waited for the light to change. She had dyed-blonde shoulder-length hair and looked a little too skinny – a woman who kept herself in shape. She gave him a smile, which either meant you don’t remember me, or can you believe what we got up to last time?

  ‘This isn’t your neck of the woods.’

  ‘Well, my club’s around the corner. How about you?’

  ‘There’s a Sporting Life exhibition at FIT.’ She said it with quote marks in her voice, good-humoredly. ‘I don’t know, like tennis shoes and Lycra. You should check it out. How’s Dana?’

  So it was one of her friends; another mother, maybe.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Great. Well, stuck with Cal, while I …’ And he lifted his racket bag. ‘Actually, I’m running a little late …’ And when the traffic cleared, he jogged lightly across 8th Avenue.

  Afterwards, he felt faintly guilty and annoyed. The kind of all-purpose intimacy of ‘hey, you’ – no doubt she had forgotten his name. And the way he ran off, like a guy. Was he supposed to want to flirt with her? Who knows. All of these vague protocols and semi-relationships. Once you reach a certain point, everything adds pressure. Even the kid at the front desk, who knew Paul by name and called him Mr Essinger, meant you had to act out the role of minor celebrity. At a tennis club, a guy ranked 82nd in the world occupies a position, which has little to do with who you are or the kinds of interaction you feel capable of having on any particular day.

  The kid had a textbook out in front of him, big as a phone book. He was studying for his MCATs. ‘Good luck with that,’ Paul said, stupidly.

  On the way to the changing room, down the windowless corridor (there were arty, cartoony pictures of famous tennis players on the wall, though not one of him), Paul remembered the woman’s name – Ireney. ‘My mother is Russian Orthodox,’ she had told him. ‘If you know anything about that, it makes a kind of sense.’ They were at some party at somebody’s house; Dana was there, too, Cal was a baby, very small, and they were still trying to pretend they had a normal life, toting him around. A friend of Susie’s husband had invited them along, a writer. Susie was there, too, and spent most of the evening with Cal asleep in her arms. And Paul had this intense conversation with Ireney about kids – she was very sympathetic, she had three boys, in their teens. Maybe she was older than forty-five now. He talked to her about what he felt like when Cal was born, the instant identification. Cal was long and skinny, wide-eyed, and Paul tho
ught, this happened to me, too. ‘I mean, like, what a thing to wake up to.’ That’s what he said to her, slightly drunk. ‘I thought, he’s me. What’s happening to him is happening to me.’ The apartment had a balcony and they went outside so Ireney could smoke. Dana came out after a while and took over the conversation, and Paul went inside and sat next to his sister on a sofa. You have these dim memories. It doesn’t matter what you say, you forget it anyway. But for Paul, getting changed, laying his bags across the wooden bench, smelling the old shower smell, sitting down, taking off his shoes, changing his socks, the vague feeling of guilt intensified, like he had let someone down.

  Luigi was already on court, warming up. That fat fuck – this is what he sometimes called himself. Another one of Marcello’s protégés, though Luigi had retired from the circuit a few years before. Even in his playing days, he was a little chunky; one of these bouncer types, thick-legged and built like a lampshade, very heavy on top. A beer belly. But he hit the ball a ton, and cleanly, too. At his best, in the early noughties, he was ranked number twelve in the world and once reached the semis of the US Open. Since retiring, he had moved to New York full-time and let himself go – he ate what he liked, he got drunk. (He did all these things before but used to run some of it off.) Now he was trying to turn himself into a television personality, the colorful ex-player. But the transition wasn’t easy. On air he came across like somebody trying too hard. He hammed up the Italian thing, they showed him cooking tomato sauce in his kitchen, before a match: ‘This is what you need to eat-a the night-a before.’ But it all seemed staged, the kind of thing a producer would dream up. Which was odd, because in life Luigi was knowledgeable and smart, a very self-aware player – funny, too. And good to practice with, because he hit the ball so hard.

  He wore cut-off jeans shorts and an extra-large Iron Maiden T-shirt, with the band name stenciled in bloody red. His hair, what was left of it, was tied back in a ponytail; there were freckles and flakes of dried sunburn on his scalp. When Paul came in, he was practicing his serve. Never one of his strong points; Luigi was only five ten. An outsider would think, looking at the two of them – Paul, slender and handsome, strong-armed, light-footed – that the fat guy didn’t have a chance. But in fact their practice sessions were extremely competitive.