‘I don’t want dessert, thank you,’ Julie said. ‘Anyway, it will be over then.’
‘Julie,’ Nathan called out from the dining room. ‘Come. Now.’
In fact, he resented Paul for intervening with his kids and redirected those feelings towards his children.
‘What about Margot?’
‘Margot, you, too. Stop crying.’
‘But he snatched.’
Paul felt strangely heartbroken by that he. He remembered, when he was a kid, what adults were like, foreigners. Even people your parents loved. There was something showy about all their friendships and relations, something not quite real. You knew this; and then you grew up and realized, you were right.
Dana got up and started clearing their plates from the coffee table.
‘Paul, is it worth it? Everybody was enjoying themselves.’
‘There was something I wanted to say.’
‘To the kids?’
‘Forget it.’
‘Do the kids need to hear it?’
‘I wanted them to hear it, yes.’
‘All right, kids. Come on.’
She picked up Cal from his little chair but he didn’t want to leave his cousins – she had to put him down again, he was wriggling so much.
Julie said, ‘Uncle Paul ate before everybody else did anyway.’
Nathan kept his voice deliberately level. ‘When I say something once I don’t expect to have to repeat myself.’
‘Fine.’ Her chair was much too small for her, and when she stood up, it fell over. She left it like that and walked into the dining room.
‘There’s nowhere for me to sit,’ she said.
‘Pick up the chair you knocked down. I said, pick up the chair.’
Jean made a noise and Nathan looked at her. ‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ Jean said.
‘What?’
‘I just don’t understand why everything has to be a fight.’
‘Because everything’s a fight.’
‘Don’t say it like that. Don’t say it like, when you have kids, you’ll understand. I grew up in a family, too.’
‘And we fought all the time, you just don’t remember. It’s not a big deal.’
‘Well, maybe that’s where we disagree. It should be possible—’
‘And, listen,’ Nathan broke in. ‘Two minutes ago, you were the one picking a fight with Liesel.’
‘That’s for the same reason. You have no idea how spoiled we all sound.’
By the time Julie returned, Dana had brought more chairs from the kitchen; everybody made room. Cal sat on her lap, but wouldn’t touch his fruit salad, so Dana ate it for him. Bill said, ‘Very nice.’
Julie picked out the grapes. Margot said, ‘I don’t like bananas.’
‘So don’t eat the bananas,’ Nathan told her.
‘It all tastes like bananas.’
Jean said, ‘Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I’m probably part of the problem.’
Paul was starting to regret the whole thing. He felt angry before, but most of the anger had gone, and he now just felt embarrassed and upset. ‘Would you like something else?’ he asked Margot, trying to make it up to her. ‘We’ve got different kinds of yoghurt in the fridge. Strawberry. Raspberry. Yoghurt and honey.’
‘No, thank you,’ Margot said, politely.
‘Cal might like a yoghurt,’ Dana broke in. ‘I’d get it, but I’m kind of stuck here.’
In the kitchen, by himself, Paul turned on the hot tap and let it warm up his hands, which were still a little sticky from the fruit juice. He stood like that longer than he needed to, trying to control himself. Start again. There are things you can only say in a certain mood, but the mood was broken, and he didn’t know whether it was better to wait or just go through with it. But if you waited, people acted like you were making a big deal. So either way you were screwed. It didn’t really matter.
When he came back in, he had forgotten Cal’s yoghurt. So he went out again and mixed plain yoghurt with honey, using two spoons, and licked the honey-spoon afterwards and left it in the sink. Just to sweeten my disposition, he told himself. So that when Nathan said, ‘What’s the big announcement?’, Paul could push through his reluctance.
‘I just wanted to say thank you for coming. I know it’s a schlepp, and you’ve been doing it for years. It can’t be much fun for anybody. Especially for the kids. You get dragged down here. And I don’t even let you watch TV. Anyway, and all of this happens at a moment when I’m particularly caught up with myself and not really paying attention. I feel like there’s something kind of disproportionate about all of the effort people make to be here.’ He looked at Jean, who looked back at him with her younger-sister eyes, very wide and registering already the emotion he had begun to feel, and which seeing her brought out. ‘Especially you, Jean. I mean, it’s a long way to come. And for what. Mostly to watch me lose. Look, I’m not asking for a pep talk. I’m just describing facts. Maybe I say this every year. But the other thing I wanted to say is, this is the last year. Nobody has to do this again. Which makes it seem a suitable time to – register my appreciation. You know, I want to go into this thing with my eyes open.’
‘You don’t have to make up your mind now,’ Bill said. ‘See how you feel when it’s over, in a couple of weeks.’
‘To prove to you that I’ve thought about this I’m not going to pick a fight about it now.’
Dana looked at him, a little stunned. This was the first she’d heard of it. But her instinct with the Essingers was always to resist getting involved. And part of what upset her was just the idea that Paul’s retiring was their business first and not hers. The other part was, how easy he found it to keep these things to himself. Every night they shared a bed, they kissed each other before turning over. I mean, what else is he keeping back? I could understand it if he were having an affair. But what’s the point of not talking to me about this? She still had Cal on her lap, eating his yoghurt, and she couldn’t help it, she kept thinking mine, mine, mine.
After supper, Nathan took his kids home – they were staying in Columbia housing, near Morningside Park. A friend of his at the law school was on sabbatical in Rome; his apartment was empty. The guy wasn’t married, but he had a study/spare bedroom, and a fold-out double bed where the kids could sleep. They would be perfectly comfortable – it was a nice apartment, with a corner view over the park on one side and downtown on the other. High enough you didn’t hear much of the traffic noise. The kids should be tired enough to sleep anywhere.
‘How’s Clémence?’ Paul asked, while they gathered in the hallway. Nathan had dropped their overnight bag at the apartment, after driving down. Now it was just a question of remembering his briefcase and any stupid little things the kids had brought with them or picked up during the day.
‘Sorry not to be here. She sends her regrets. But her sister is going through a tough time, IVF, the hormones make you a little crazy, and this seemed like too good a chance to miss, going to see her without the kids. Anyway, I like having them on my own. You just deal with it.’
‘What do you deal with?’ Julie asked.
‘You,’ he said, and Nathan picked her up – even though she was big, as tall as some grown women, and she seemed a little uncomfortable in his arms. But she liked having a tall father. He put her down again; she was red-faced.
‘Are we going to get a yellow cab?’ she said.
‘We’re getting a yellow cab.’
And Julie pulled at her sister’s arm. ‘Margot, Margot. We’re getting a yellow cab.’
‘Do you want me to come? I can help put the kids to bed.’ Jean was conscious of not getting along with Nathan very well and wanted to compensate.
‘It’s fine. It’s really not a problem anymore. But come if you want to. That’d be nice.’
‘It’s not a question of what I want.’
‘No, come. I was just thinking, there’s some work I was hoping to get done when they’re in be
d. But I’d rather talk to you. Come.’
‘Look, I can hang out here as well. It’s not a big deal.’
But Julie started pulling at her T-shirt. ‘We never get to see you.’ She could act the kid when she wanted to, she could be very dramatic. Margot joined in, tugging at her shirt, and Jean had to tell them, ‘Not on my clothes.’
‘Done,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s decided. And we can pay for the cab to take you home.’
‘I can pay myself. I can take the subway. I can walk. I’m like a grown-up.’
But she came anyway. Bill was in the kitchen doing the dishes, but Jean said goodbye to everyone else and followed Nathan and the kids into the elevator.
Suddenly the apartment seemed much quieter, almost empty. Bill finished up in the kitchen and asked Dana if he could use the phone. Paul and Dana retreated down the hallway to put Cal to bed. Liesel couldn’t hear them – her hearing had gotten worse. She sat on the sofa and thought, maybe I should help them, I should go see Cal in his bath. But she also wanted to leave them alone. She was also tired. Bill kept pacing back and forth, talking to his sister. He was always restless physically and with cordless phones could talk happily for hours, which he never used to do. Liesel felt mixed emotions – not just mixed, but stirred up, unsettled. It pleased her to see Jean going off with Nathan, two of her kids living their independent lives, accommodating each other. But she also thought, when they were little and fought, it didn’t seem to matter so much. Everybody laughed more.
*
In fact, Jean turned out to be very helpful. She was a deeply competent person; her job required her to coordinate lots of different people and bring various unrelated skill-sets to bear on complex tasks. In other words, as Nathan reflected, she would make an excellent parent. When they arrived at the apartment, the beds were unmade and the sofa-bed in the study was still a sofa. Nathan couldn’t find sheets or towels; Jean found them. She managed to work the TV, which seemed to involve several competing remote controls, so the kids could watch while Nathan prepared something for Margot to eat, because she hadn’t eaten much at supper with nobody looking out for her. Some milk and dry crackers (Ryvita) with jam spread over them. Julie had a bowl of cornflakes, a habit she had picked up from her father. All of the Essinger men liked eating cereal before bed.
The apartment had a dining table in the living room – some of the chairs faced the TV. While the kids were eating, Nathan and Jean pulled out the sofa-bed together and fitted the sheets, filled the pillowcases with pillows, and laid a woollen blanket over the top. Nathan rifled through their overnight bag to find nightclothes and toothbrushes and sleeping toys. Margot had a little shark; Julie slept with a Raggedy Ann doll, which used to belong to her mother.
Jean said to him, ‘You’re a good daddy,’ because she was touched to think of him remembering these things for his kids’ sake. As a brother he had much less tolerance for the insignificant.
‘Julie,’ Nathan said, when she had finished her bowl. ‘No reading tonight. It’s late, and Margot needs to go to bed.’
‘Can’t I stay up with you?’
‘It’s a strange house. I don’t think she’ll want to go to bed alone.’
Margot was watching the television; it was sometimes hard to tell how much she listened in. She had large round gray eyes, like Jean.
‘Well, we can ask her.’
‘You can ask her.’
‘Margot,’ Julie said, in her sweetest voice. ‘You don’t mind sleeping in that big bed alone.’
‘I do,’ Margot said, still watching. ‘I want to sleep with you.’
‘I’ll give you a present.’
‘What present?’
‘I’ll give you money.’
Margot had a dim sense of the value of money, but she liked the thought of it. Julie figured she could probably get away with offering a nickel.
‘Not like that,’ Nathan said.
‘Like what?’
But it didn’t matter. Margot agreed, but then when Nathan tried to put her to bed, she refused and called out for Julie. The long narrow room was full of books, on all sides – they seemed to lean out of the walls. There were pictures, too, large Victorian prints, vaguely Hogarthian, of drunken men and loose women, brightly colored in. The window over the desk had no curtains; the night looked very black outside, with gleams of city light. And Margot could smell something intimate and unfamiliar in the woolen blanket, not just a wool smell, but something else. Some of Mommy’s friends smelled like that. The guy whose apartment it was used to nap on the couch. He smoked, not at home, but enough for the smell to come through. It was scratchy too; Margot was used to duvets.
An African mask, a man’s face with an open mouth and sharp pointy wooden hair, hung over the doorway.
‘Julie,’ Nathan said. ‘Come on. Help me out here.’
‘But we had a deal. It’s not fair.’
Nathan considered this. ‘I don’t know if it’s fair or not. I’ll have to think it through. But I’m perfectly willing to talk it over.’ He had to repeat himself, more loudly: ‘I said I’m willing to talk it over.’
Julie, in her nightdress, which swept almost to the floor, came into the bedroom. She had been shouting her end of the conversation from next door and looked up at her father now with a kind of sarcastic meekness or air of dutiful constraint.
‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ Nathan asked.
She nodded.
‘The deal you made with Margot is neither here nor there,’ he went on. ‘It’s not a binding contract. She doesn’t understand the value of what you’re offering, and you know that. She isn’t competent to judge.’
‘But she agreed.’
‘That counts for less than you think. But I don’t really think you expected it to count for much. You knew she would change her mind. The contract argument isn’t your best bet.’
‘What is?’ she asked.
Jean, who was standing in the doorway, watched them. She could see how much Julie loved her father, she had softened already. Nathan was giving her his full, adult attention, the attention he would give one of his students. He was a very good teacher.
‘Well, you could say, for example, that at home you get to read in your room, while Margot has to have lights off by eight o’clock. And there’s nothing in itself about sleeping in another house that should affect these relative privileges. Especially since my reason for curtailing them has nothing to do with you – with anything you’ve done or didn’t do. It’s just because Margot is scared to sleep alone.’
‘Okay, that’s what I want to say.’
‘The argument is complicated, because one of the things this arrangement makes clear is that the principle of equality doesn’t really operate here, in the family. You’ve got rights and responsibilities that Margot doesn’t, and I’ve got rights and responsibilities that you don’t have. We’re not all equal before the law, which makes it difficult to argue from first principles. Or rather, the first principle is the family – everything’s for the state. From each according to her ability, to each according to her need. And your sister needs you to go to bed now, so go to bed.’
Jean said, ‘Can I read a little to both of them? I never get to read out loud any more without feeling weird.’
‘Do you want Jean to read to you?’
‘Okay,’ Julie said and got into bed. Jean took off her shoes and climbed in between the girls.
‘What should I read?’
But they had an argument about that, too, which Julie won. Nathan said she could choose the book, it was only fair. Julie had read Little House on the Prairie when she was eight, and loved it. Now she was going through the backlist. Jean picked up her novel and started from the bookmark, in the middle of a chapter. She read very well, very naturally, while Margot stroked the side of her face, without saying anything. Jean kept going. It tickled a little, but she didn’t want her to stop.
Afterwards, feeling a little softened up, Jean told Nathan about Henrik.
Margot was sleeping, the lights were out. Julie lay wide-eyed in the dark, and if you put your head around the door she gave you a suffering look. But she didn’t stir or call out, and Nathan found some red wine in a cupboard and took it out on the balcony – there was a small balcony running off the kitchen, and a couple of chairs outside. In the coolish summer night, under low-pressure clouds, sitting ten stories up over Morningside Park, they drank half the bottle. The chairs were still wet when they sat on them. Jean sat down then got back up and wiped them with a kitchen towel, but she could still feel the damp patch on her Levi’s. Nathan pretended not to care. He stretched out his legs and crossed them, he gave her his full attention, too. This was a very attractive quality, women liked him for it. Jean was much younger than her brother, nine years younger, and sometimes she still felt like a kid around him. She wanted his approval and advice. But for the first part of her story, he just listened.
‘Of course, if he were happy,’ she said, ‘none of this would be happening. But he’s not happy. I don’t like any of the phrases that you use, I’m suspicious of them, too, but they’ve grown apart. In almost twenty years of marriage, he’s never seen her cry. He told me that.’
‘That’s not growing apart. You don’t strike me as much of a crier.’
‘I don’t know if that’s true. He can make me cry if he wants to.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of that.’
‘Maybe it came out the wrong way. I mean, I let myself go around him, which I don’t really do with anybody, outside the family.’
Nathan didn’t know what to say. He had opinions, strong opinions, but he needed to be careful about measuring them out, in manageable doses. Jean could get prickly, everything was pissing her off today, and for the moment at least, he wasn’t. He was also fairly upset and already on his second large glass of wine. Not that he felt the least bit drunk. But whatever he felt seemed a little deeper and more meaningful than it usually did.
‘Look, if it makes you happy,’ he said, ‘then I’m happy for you.’
‘He makes me happy. You know, one of the things that neither one of us has any doubts about is our feelings for each other. I’ve been in relationships where you spend the whole time wondering if it’s real. This isn’t one of them.’
A Weekend in New York Page 13
