A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘That’s what I mean. You have more respect for success than I do.’

  ‘Maybe, but that has nothing to do with being an aristocrat. Quite the reverse.’

  Susie wondered if she should intervene, but the kids seemed to be playing happily together. And even noticing something that upset her, Ben fudging or lying or cheating, involved her with him in some way that also offered a retreat. From Nathan and Liesel and Jean, from her old family, whose problems weren’t quite her problems anymore.

  Bill came in shortly after, with one side of his shirt untucked. ‘What’s the plan?’ he said. ‘Has anyone called Paul?’ He was carrying a bag of groceries from Fairway Market – mostly fruit, a watermelon, which he cut up in the kitchen, some cherries and grapes, which he washed and put out in whatever bowls he could find. For the next few minutes he had juice on his fingers and beard, he kept eating slices of melon, and spitting pits and pips into his hand, walking back to the kitchen to throw them away.

  Jean said, ‘How was Aunt Rose?’

  ‘The way she lives, the way she’s forced to live, it’s depressing. Everybody she knows has moved up and away around her. The people who come in are people she’s never going to be friends with.’

  ‘What does that mean? Black people.’

  ‘It means what I said. People she won’t become friends with. At her age. When she can hardly get out of the house. Unless she drives. And even getting into the car and out again is no picnic for her. How is she going to meet these people, I don’t care who they are.’

  Liesel said, ‘I’ll call Paul now.’ She put her hands on the table but didn’t move.

  ‘I don’t want him under any pressure to come out to see us. He’s got a match tomorrow, he doesn’t need any obligations.’

  ‘I don’t think he thinks of us as obligations,’ Jean said. She was still on the floor with the kids. ‘Someone help me up.’ And she reached out her hand. ‘My back gets stiff.’ Ben stood up and started pulling.

  ‘He’s quite strong,’ Susie told her, but in fact Jean had to shift onto her haunches, he couldn’t lift her.

  ‘I’ve put on weight.’

  ‘Not that I can see,’ Liesel said.

  ‘At a certain point, everything becomes an obligation.’

  ‘I want to see Paul, I want to talk to my brother,’ Susie said, her voice rising slightly. ‘You guys saw him last night. I want to see him.’

  *

  In fact, Paul stopped by with Cal around five o’clock. He gave the kid supper in the kitchen, just one of those pots of baby food. Dana had a gym thing she liked to go to. Maybe she’d join them later for dinner, depending on where they went. He planned to stay home with Cal and watch a baseball game.

  Nathan said, ‘Do you want somebody to hang out with?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be much company tonight.’

  He felt strangely excluded from the clutter he saw around him: Bill’s bowls of fruit on the table (the paper grocery bag, with nothing inside it, had fallen over), Ben’s backpack on the couch, Susie’s roller suitcase, the coffee table pushed to one side, pick-up sticks on the floor, a book on an armrest, kids everywhere, his mother’s computer cord stretching across the parquet floor. When they were children, traveling, they used to sleep on sofas, they colonized many of his parents’ friends’ apartments, and all of this mess, people getting bored and restless, people resting, people arguing about where to eat, struck him as very familiar. Somehow the rest of them were all in it together, but not him. Something to be grateful for, maybe; or else to mind.

  Julie was especially helpful with Cal. She loved babies. She was at that age, where girls have identified what they get praised for, or what they think they get praised for. The kitchen was tiny for an apartment this size, just a staging area really, but it had a small side-table, where Cal could sit, and Julie stood beside him, dipping a plastic spoon into the pot (whatever they gave him to eat, lamb, beef, chicken, looked like colored apple sauce) and poking it into his mouth. ‘He can do it himself,’ Paul said at first, but watching him make a mess wasn’t Julie’s idea of help, so he left her to it.

  ‘How are you feeling, son?’ Bill said. ‘I bought some fruit.’

  ‘I’m fine, all right. I feel all right.’ He pulled off a twig of grapes and picked at them.

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ Bill said. ‘Do what you have to do.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  Some of the grapes looked faintly discolored, whitish instead of green, like the skin under a Band Aid, there were soft spots, and Paul put them down on a section of newspaper, feeling childish. As a kid, he couldn’t bear any sign of ripeness in fruits, any rottenness, he was very particular about some things, and recently he had realized these feelings were related to the presence of his family, he needed to fence off certain areas.

  Susie said, ‘What’s Dana doing?’

  ‘Spin class.’

  ‘On a Sunday night?’

  Bill said, ‘She doesn’t need to come out with us later.’

  ‘Even on Sunday nights in this city people spin.’

  Jean said, ‘She can come if she wants to.’

  ‘I don’t want her waking up Paul when she gets in.’

  ‘How late are you guys thinking of going out?’ Paul asked. ‘I mean, you’re taking the kids, right?’

  These conversations could go on and on. Maybe Dana was right – as soon as he saw his family he went into retreat-mode. But it was always like this, before a tournament. Your levels of self-involvement go through the roof. Just to conceal the degree of self-obsession is a full-time job. There’s something almost therapeutic about the process. Everything else burns away and what’s left is a kind of hard, bright core. And the people around you feel it, too, they seem to respect it. There was something in his physical presence, a weird combination of nerves and calm. When he picked at his eyelashes, you could see the muscles in his forearm move under the skin. He didn’t talk much; whatever he did, he did slowly, partly because he was wearing flip-flops. His feet ached, his pulse was somewhere in the forties.

  Paul said to his father, ‘Don’t worry about me, Dad. I had a run today, I hit a few balls, I feel good.’

  ‘Enjoy it, right? That’s all you can do.’

  Jean said to her mother, ‘What’s the password on your computer?’

  Bill fingered Paul’s grapes and asked, ‘Is something wrong with these?’ and started eating them.

  Susie said to Nathan, ‘How late are you willing to keep your kids up?’

  ‘I’m not worried about it,’ he said. ‘It’s not an issue.’

  Paul, listening to their crosstalk, remembered something. Bill had a friend in London they used to stay with, an American guy who worked at the LSE. His apartment was in the penthouse of a student block, right in the middle of the city – you walked out of the lobby into a bus lane. Red double-deckers. There was a pub on the corner with etched-glass windows, the side street led to Covent Garden. The apartment itself felt like an island of Americana. Leather couches sat in front of an early large-screen TV, whose projector took up the middle of the room. One summer Jean and Paul got food poisoning or some kind of gastrointestinal thing on the flight from Austin. They spent the first five days of vacation horizontal, lying on the couches, and watching Wimbledon. Bill kept offering to queue up for day tickets – he didn’t mind leaving the house at 5 a.m. or waiting in line for three hours. But Paul felt too sick. Even now, he could hardly bear to sit on leather furniture. Maybe he was thirteen years old, Jean was ten. Sampras had just come on the scene; Paul was an Agassi fan, Jean liked Lendl. The truth is, they had a very happy week, drinking weak tea with sugar and eating McVitie’s digestive biscuits. Arguing and annoying each other.

  Jean said, tapping at their mother’s computer: ‘The good places to eat are mostly downtown.’

  ‘That’s fine with me.’

  ‘That may play a part in whether Dana decides to come along,’ Paul told them.

&
nbsp; ‘I’m not saying it’s an issue. I’m just asking how late.’

  ‘So let’s stay local.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a consideration. I’m only mentioning it.’

  ‘Of course it’s a consideration,’ Jean said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  And on and on. Ben had the right idea. He sat on the sofa reading his book. Paul went in the kitchen to clean up his son. Afterwards, Susie offered to walk him home and the three of them waited for the elevator and then got in. Bill asked, ‘Will we see you before the match?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Paul said, and they descended into the lobby and walked out into the street. It felt much warmer outside – uncomfortably warm, the apartment was well shaded, it had windows only on one side.

  As soon as they hit Central Park West, the sun beat down on them; it reflected off the pavement and the moving cars. The light was very white, you blinked against it. Whatever clouds there were just kept the heat in. More storms were predicted in the night. The air, like a dishcloth, needed to be wrung out again and again.

  When Cal complained about walking, Paul lifted him onto his shoulders, still holding his hands. They crossed the road like this, and into the park, into its shade, and the traffic-noise retreated, too, it was easy to talk.

  ‘Let me take your bag at least,’ Susie said, but the strap was tangled up in Cal’s legs and in the end she gave up. It bumped against Paul’s hip at every step; his flip-flops slapped the pavement. They passed a playground, but it was partly hidden by trees, and Paul said, ‘If we keep walking, maybe he won’t notice.’ Sometimes, even with his sister, he became aware of the awkwardness of being alone with another human being. There are formalities you have to go through. ‘Ben has grown,’ he added, but the formalities also make you feel a little sad, something genuine, which can open up the conversation. ‘Even since the last time I saw him. He seems very – self-possessed.’

  ‘I saw him cheating at pick-up sticks just now. I don’t know. He starts junior high next week. They don’t always show it but he feels like he’s under pressure.’

  ‘Did you say something to him?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know what to do. I kept telling myself, it doesn’t matter. But I was also a little upset. It’s just a stupid game, but he’s not one of those kids who wins at games, and part of me just wanted him to win, too.’

  With her hair pulled back in a bun, Paul could see the gray in it; but Susie didn’t seem to care. Her face had grown narrower with age – she was one of these women who gets skinny with motherhood. Just from worry, she might have said, but the truth is, she also watched her weight. Her friends were health-conscious, competitive and generally über-competent. Susie wore nice clothes but nothing fancy, most of them she bought from catalogues, she said she didn’t have time to go shopping. When they were younger, Paul remembered, he used to tease her for being fat. The thought made him nostalgic.

  ‘I know very few adults who cheat at pick-up sticks,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.’

  ‘But they cheat at other things.’

  Anyone seeing them, Susie thought, would think they were a family. And the park was full of people, walking dogs or pushing strollers, a sunny Sunday afternoon, kids throwing Frisbees on the Great Lawn, a softball game going, there was a Boombox playing by the soda-concession – ‘Batdance,’ from the movie, the vendor had a bandanna and kept mouthing the words. His shoes, a pair of Hi-Tec high tops, looked dirty and busted; his jeans were gray. From his expressions you couldn’t tell if he was angry or happy.

  ‘Cal’s falling asleep,’ she said.

  ‘He goes to bed too late. Dana and I keep having stupid fights.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About putting him to bed. Come on, buddy,’ he said, lifting him down and setting Cal on his feet. ‘You snooze, you walk.’ But in the end, Paul carried him anyway, in his arms, against his hip, because Cal refused – he kept flopping and falling over, as if his bones were made of jelly.

  ‘Did you tell anybody about me?’ Susie asked. Her tone was older-sisterly. None of the Essinger children had a strong southern accent, they mostly sounded like East Coasters, but Paul also heard a class overlay in his sister’s voice (what you make yourself into, by fitting in), something sweet and tough, the tone of a woman with a role in the PTA.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t really see that as my job in the family, to communicate. But I don’t think they’ll … object.’

  Susie made a noise, like a huh, through her nose. ‘They’ll think I’m giving up on my career.’

  ‘They think that anyway. But it’s not you they’re worried about right now.’

  ‘I heard. I’m sad. I like having a famous kid brother.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m not more famous.’

  ‘Nobody cares.’

  ‘Bill cares, a little.’

  ‘Maybe he does but not much.’

  They were coming up to the 86th Street Transverse: somewhere below them, the footpath led over a bridge to the reservoir, where Paul had run that morning. But you could see the cars slipping by underneath, mostly taxis, there was a pattern there, a lesson in fractions; and then, at ground level, runners and cyclists passed them on the road, you had to wait for a gap in the bodies to cross over, towards the West side, where there was another playground. This time Cal saw it and Paul gave him a turn on the swing.

  ‘I don’t know if you’re in a hurry,’ he said to his sister. As a young boy, Paul used to be obsessed with his big brother – Nathan to him was all-in-all. But later, as he grew older, he started to see things from Susie’s point of view. Nathan and Susie used to fight a lot; as first-and second-born, they were caught in the middle of a deep loving battle that Paul wasn’t really a part of. Eventually he understood this and stopped taking sides. And Paul and Susie formed another one of those alliances, the middle children, sensible and undemanding. They hosted tea parties for their stuffed animals, he was very happy with girls’ games, and sometimes he felt guilty of a betrayal – of Nathan. But you put the work into these relationships, at eight or nine years old, and later, twenty or thirty years later, there’s a kind of muscle memory.

  ‘If I want to go, I can just go,’ Susie said. They were standing side by side behind the swing; every few seconds Paul gave Cal a push.

  ‘It’s not really me or you they should worry about.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Next to the swings was a picnic area, just a patch of grass, where a woman sat sprinkling cheese into a Tupperware container of pasta. She sat on her haunches, beside a blanket. Another mother ate a carrot stick and continued talking; a baby lay asleep on his back. The first woman called out, ‘Riley, supper time,’ and Susie thought, you’re going to wake him up.

  ‘Jean has gotten into a thing with her boss,’ Paul said. ‘He’s married. I think she thinks she’s serious about him.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘She told Dana. I don’t know who else.’

  ‘Does he have kids?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Susie said.

  For a minute they stood there like that – Cal’s swinging gave a rhythm to their silence. A girl came over and sat down on the blanket, Susie watched her eat. Eventually Paul said, ‘I have this idea, I don’t know how crazy it is, of moving back to Texas. I’m in the process of buying a house outside Wimberley; there’s land enough for me to build a whole … a series of cabins … Room for everybody, that’s my idea. Pretty near Canyon Lake. Well, I’m considering it. Money isn’t a problem for me anymore, there’s nothing I have to do. I just want to get out of this mess.’

  ‘What mess?’ Susie said.

  ‘I don’t know. The whole thing. So when are you going to tell them?’

  ‘Tonight, tomorrow maybe.’

  But Cal was getting bored on the swing, bored and tired, he needed to go to bed, and Paul lifted him up, first by the armpits, and then hoisting him, throwing and turning him a littl
e, and shifting his hands to the boy’s waist. Cal put his arms around his father’s neck, he was very warm, and Paul said to his sister, with his face partly obscured, ‘They love you, they’ll be happy.’

  ‘I guess we won’t see you before you step on court.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I like watching you play,’ she said, before putting her arm around the two of them (she had to reach up) and walking back alone the way they had come.

  *

  It was almost seven o’clock, but the park was still full: people winding up a long day outside, lying in the grass surrounded by empty containers; joggers going for an early evening run, a bunch of them wearing some kind of uniform, green T-shirts with a company logo, colleagues training together; power-walkers, too, a pair of women swinging their arms robustly; old guys, dog-walkers, lovers. There really are lovers, she saw a couple of kids against a tree, the boy leaning in, with his arm raised above her and his hand on the trunk. So posed. The girl wore tiny shorts, almost painful, her legs looked pale, she was resting against the tree, as if in retreat. From time to time they each seemed to say something, one or two words, they kissed like that, too. Maybe they were sixteen or seventeen years old; he had white socks and skater shoes. Just the intensity of it is something you forget, thank God. Amazing how dense the life is here, and she stopped by the Boombox guy to buy a bottle of water.

  The heat was getting to her, she didn’t feel right. Some woman was ahead of her waiting for change, all she had was a twenty-dollar bill. Another song was playing now, Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls, and the vendor peeled through the stash in his fanny-pack, counting down – he had a lot of dirty singles. He lost count and had to start over; his hands were wet from the icebox. She had read somewhere that the license fee for operating these food carts was over two hundred thousand dollars a year. It didn’t make sense. Who had that kind of money? Who would take such a risk? When Susie asked for an Evian, she almost couldn’t hear herself. He said, ‘Here you go, lady’ – she had the dollar and a quarter ready in her palm. Afterwards, she sat on a bench for a minute to unscrew the cap and drink.