A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  But Nathan was used to it and kept going. ‘His wife is an exceptionally smart woman. Clémence was on a panel with her or maybe they judged a prize together. She said she learned something useful from her. That when you’re doing one of these public service things that people do in a half-assed way, if you come prepared, fully prepared, you get your way.’

  ‘As if all they think about is getting their way,’ Jean said.

  ‘Of course that’s what they think about.’

  Dana said to Julie, who was sitting next to her: ‘I don’t understand what they’re arguing about.’ And Julie said, ‘Nobody’s arguing, they’re just trying to get at Nathan.’

  There was a story Fritz heard that Ronstadt had cited one of Nathan’s articles in the Memo. It was impossible to know because the government refused to publish it. And Nathan himself wouldn’t say one way or another; he claimed he didn’t know.

  Jean said, ‘I’m sorry, but I find all this incredibly upsetting. You have no idea how – American all this sounds. Not just the drone strikes, which are bad enough. But the cover-up and the fact that the only reason any of this matters is that one of the people they killed was an American citizen.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Nathan said. ‘Because that’s the legal issue. That’s where they thought they could pick a fight.’

  ‘Who do you mean, they?’

  ‘The Times. The ACLU. It’s a specific instance. That’s what you look for in the law, a specific instance that tests the principle.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ Jean said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like I’m one of your students.’

  Liesel, smiling in a hot-and-bothered way, looked over at Dana. ‘You need to eat something, too,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have a plate.’

  ‘Take mine, I’m finished. Too much food. Americans always give you too much food.’

  ‘It’s an Italian thing,’ Bill said. His beard had crumbs in it, from the soft white bread lying half-cut in wicker baskets on the table. But underneath his beard he looked like Paul, the same slightly earnest, slightly eager boy’s face. ‘When I was a kid,’ he went on, ‘half the kids I knew were Italian. There were restaurants like this in Port Jervis. But we never ate there because they weren’t kosher.’

  In the end Dana used one of the food dishes – Jean handed her the rest of the meatballs, on a platter, and Dana cleared some space in front of her. There was an old jam jar on the table with knives and forks, wrapped up in napkins. Susie said, ‘What can I get you?’ and passed the broccoli towards her, and the Caesar salad. She wore a dress, with pixelated colors on it, reds and muted blues, and sat up straight in her chair, with her hair up. Looking proper and somehow touching, a still youngish mother dressing up for

  It’s true, Dana thought, taking the plates, I’m just hungry. And when you’re hungry you can’t make decisions, you know this about yourself. She had worked out hard that afternoon, and the first mouthful of meatballs and spaghetti tasted of calories to her, like a battery tang, energy coming back into the system.

  ‘When I first met you, I was worried you didn’t eat.’ Liesel looked on approvingly. ‘And then we took you for barbecue and I watched you eat. I was very relieved.’

  ‘The first time I had dinner with your family,’ Dana said, ‘I had to sneak off to the bathroom to cry.’

  ‘Are we so terrible?’

  ‘I wasn’t used to it. I’m an only child.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you ended up with the easy one.’

  ‘That’s because you’re his mother.’ It was Susie talking – she had a voice she sometimes used, sensible and sisterly, and certain expressions to go with it, when she was out with her girlfriends. ‘I’m sure Paul isn’t easy to live with. He suits himself.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Liesel said. And then, with her round brown face, which always looked wide open somehow, totally exposed, she turned to Dana: ‘Which doesn’t mean I don’t worry about him.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I’m worried about him now.’

  ‘He’s doing all right. I don’t know. He kicked me out tonight.’ Sometimes it surprised Dana, how much she wanted to confess things to Liesel. Even as a joke.

  ‘Why? I don’t understand.’ And she sighed, not quite honestly. ‘I feel I should apologize for my children.’

  ‘It just means he told me to come out for dinner, which is what I wanted to do anyway. It was my fault. I was being annoying.’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ Susie told her.

  But this line of sympathy struck the wrong note. Dana didn’t want to lump herself in with Susie, a woman married to a man with conventional ideas about marriage roles – she didn’t want to complain about their ‘husbands’ together. Partly because she knew Jean wouldn’t like it. Jean always resisted this kind of easy gender identification. And Dana for some reason felt closer to her tonight, maybe because of what Jean had confessed to her about the affair. Paul sometimes complained, actually he wasn’t really complaining, just describing the situation, that the family geography had all these ley lines of loyalty in it, which meant that whatever position you took, on any subject, you were also taking somebody’s side against somebody else. That’s just how it was. There was no point in fighting it. It was simpler not to have the argument at all or whatever the argument was pretending to be about. It was simpler for everybody just to admit, I like you today. And I don’t like you.

  Meanwhile, Jean was still arguing with Nathan, their voices were growing louder, and Dana heard her say, ‘That’s not what this is about. This is about telling people in power what they want to hear, so that they can exercise that power without getting into trouble for it later.’

  ‘All right,’ Nathan said. ‘This conversation is over.’

  That kind of comment hurt him more than he let on. Margot was still on his lap, he kissed her again on the head. As if to say, don’t listen to these people. Dana sometimes thought the family gave him a hard time. But she could see it from their point of view as well. Nathan was bad at smoothing things over. He shouldn’t talk to Jean like that, like the kid sister or secretary, somebody he had the authority to dismiss.

  ‘I just worry about the people you’re getting into bed with,’ she told him.

  ‘I said it’s over.’

  But Liesel chipped in now. ‘Excuse me, but Jean is right. It’s not just a question of making an argument, but what the argument will be used for.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t believe in the rule of law,’ Bill said. It was sometimes hard to tell when he was paying attention. He had started cleaning up the leftovers from unfinished plates of food, reaching across the table and using the bread to mop up sauce.

  ‘Excuse me, that’s not true.’ Liesel raised her voice slightly; this was an old argument, they had had it before. ‘I believe very much in the law. In some ways, I believe in the law more than you do … But there is a purpose to the law, which the law serves. Lawyers should serve it, too.’

  ‘That’s just what I said. You don’t believe in the rule of law.’

  Dana’s drink finally arrived. The waiter brought it over on a round tin tray, on which it looked unnecessarily precarious; the glass, as if sweating, was beaded with water. She took a sip and felt the little hit of liquor and excused herself. She said she needed the restroom, which meant that Julie had to squeeze in so that she could squeeze out and walk between tables to the back of the restaurant. Essingers, she thought, looking at herself in the mirror. It always took her a minute to get used to the atmosphere again, to acclimatize to the intensity of their relations. But what she felt was also more complicated than that, envy mixed strangely with a kind of pity, for Paul, who had been raised in this atmosphere and sometimes chose to opt out of it, like now. Her purse was in her hand; she touched the lipstick to her lips, very red, the rest of her face was unadorned, and looked at herself coolly enough. Okay, here we go.

 
‘You didn’t go out to cry?’ Liesel said, joking unhappily.

  ‘No.’

  Julie had to scooch in again, to let Dana through, and Ben, who was sitting opposite, said, ‘Okay, which is she?’

  ‘I don’t want to play this game.’

  ‘What game?’ Dana said.

  ‘Ben has a stupid, mean game they play at school.’

  ‘It’s stupid,’ Ben said, ‘but it’s not mean.’

  ‘It is mean. Either way it’s mean.’

  Nathan said, mostly to Jean, ‘That’s because you haven’t thought seriously about the problem of evil.’

  ‘Have you seen any of the programs I work on? About immigration camps in Lampedusa? About for-profit care homes? I don’t think you can have …’

  ‘You think of evil as basically an American invention for describing the rest of the world. Which it often is. But you cannot understand geopolitics if you think of it as the reasonable disagreements of reasonable people with understandably different aims.’

  ‘Who says that’s what I think. Mostly it’s a question of people with a lot of money making more out of people with less.’

  ‘That’s what I mean: the disagreements of reasonable people with different aims.’

  ‘They don’t seem very reasonable to me.’

  ‘Of course they do. Now you’re just kidding yourself. Look at the way you live, look at where you live, and how much of your life, and your friends’ lives, is defined by money and spent trying to get it.’

  ‘Okay, Nathan. First of all, I have a room in somebody’s house, you don’t know my friends, you don’t know how they live, and I can’t believe I’m having to say this to you of all people, given the house you live in and who your friends are …’

  ‘I wouldn’t deny it. I’m not trying to deny it.’

  ‘Please, Jean,’ Julie said. ‘Why are you shouting at Nathan?’

  ‘I’m not shouting.’ But then she looked at her niece and said, ‘I don’t mean to shout.’ And then, more calmly: ‘Okay, explain it to me.’

  ‘Explain what.’

  ‘The problem of evil.’

  ‘There is a kind of opposition that cannot be reasoned with or treated reasonably and one of the problems of power, of any government, is what to do with that kind of opposition without sacrificing the rule of law.’

  ‘So that’s where you come in, right?’ Jean said.

  Susie said, ‘Stop picking fights. In front of the kids.’

  ‘Who are you talking to? You mean me?’ Jean looked at her sister, wide-eyed, a little wild.

  ‘I’m talking to both of you.’

  ‘It feels like you’re talking to me.’

  ‘You feel that because … you think that everyone’s getting at you.’

  ‘That’s because everyone’s getting at me. And I don’t see what the kids have to do with it.’

  ‘Please,’ Susie said. ‘I find this upsetting.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘Please.’ And in fact even Jean could see that Susie looked emotionally charged, bright-eyed with something, pity or worry, on the verge of tears.

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘This isn’t the conversation I wanted to have tonight.’

  ‘Well, maybe if I go you can have it.’ Jean stood up, pushing her chair out, but she had to wait for Ben to budge in before squeezing through.

  Dana looked at her with a don’t-leave-me look in her eyes. ‘Where are you going?’ she said.

  ‘To make a phone call. To get out of here.’

  ‘Vulpine or porcine,’ Ben said after Jean had gone. Dana could see her descending the mezzanine stairs, onto the main floor level. A waiter was carrying up a tray of food, and she stepped aside. She said something and he laughed, then she said something else and threaded her way between the tables to the entrance. But her neck, her shoulders, the way she carried herself, looked unhappy, as if unhappiness were a weight that affected her movement.

  Eventually Dana said, ‘What?’

  ‘Vulpine or porcine, that’s the game. Everybody is one or another.’

  ‘It’s mean,’ Julie said. ‘Either way it’s mean.’

  ‘It can’t be mean if it’s mean to everybody. I don’t mind. I’m porcine.’

  ‘Do you really play this game in school, with your friends?’ Dana asked.

  ‘I guess those are the kind of friends I have.’

  ‘It’s not a nice game,’ Susie said, though she wasn’t really paying attention. She blew her nose on a napkin. ‘I didn’t mean to get into a stupid fight. We’ve basically been avoiding fighting all day.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ Nathan said. ‘I think I know what’s going on.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘Told you what?’ Liesel wanted to know.

  ‘Nothing,’ Susie said. ‘Nothing you need to worry about.’

  Ben was used to adults fighting at the dinner table; his parents often argued. For years, when he was younger, he could lighten the mood by being silly. ‘It’s not a nice game, but it’s not a not nice game either. It’s funny. Which are you?’ He looked at Dana.

  ‘I guess I’m vulpine.’

  ‘You see, it’s funny,’ Ben said, but he was trying too hard and could hear the effort in his own voice. His touch had gone, something had changed.

  Bill said to Fritz, who was sitting at his elbow, ‘My father had Italian clients, he used to eat with them at these restaurants. I found that out when I was seventeen, and would you believe it, it came as a shock. You forget how young you used to be.’

  ‘I had my first cheeseburger at a Wimpy in Covent Garden.’ Fritz’s accent still had a South African flavor, dry and sweet, a little clipped. ‘I was twenty-four years old. I had just passed my LLM and I thought, why not. The only people who would have cared were a long way away.’

  ‘Why is it porseen?’ Ben said, still pushing. ‘Why is it vulpine?’

  ‘Stop it.’ Susie finally snapped at him. ‘Stop it. I’ve said it’s not funny. Stop it now.’

  *

  Jean, in the rough warm evening air, on her own again, crossed Broadway with the traffic gunning for her but still half a block away and bought a copy of Time Out from the deli on the corner. She thought of buying a pack of cigarettes, too, but the truth is, she didn’t like smoking much, it was more of a gesture. Henrik smoked sometimes, it was something she did with him, something else his wife didn’t know about or pretended not to know about. There was an apartment block next door, with an entryway that had a light on, and she leaned against the wall and flipped through the movie listings, in case there was something she could see once the kids were in bed. But she found it hard to concentrate. All of the movies looked stupid to her. Once you get out of the habit of going to them it’s hard to break back in.

  Henrik was almost certainly asleep. It was three in the morning in Vranjic, though sometimes he stayed up late on holiday with some of the guys. They played rummy together; he would get drunk and sleep it off in the morning, go for a swim – letting their mother look after the kids. Just thinking about him made her realize how tired she was. The jet lag was almost like a fever, she felt vulnerable and unsure of herself, she needed to lie down. For a minute she watched the cars go by, surging and slowing at the lights, then she took out her cellphone and called Paul.

  ‘Did I wake you up?’ she said.

  ‘No, but I’m about to go to bed. What’s up?’

  Paul was five blocks away – if a fire engine drove past, they could both hear the siren. But it was easier talking to him on the phone.

  ‘I had a stupid fight with Nathan.’

  ‘What made it stupid?’

  ‘Me, probably. I don’t know. I get a kind of culture shock when I come back here.’

  But Paul wasn’t paying attention or wanted to put her off. ‘Did you get the meatballs?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about the meatballs. I don’t understand what the big deal is. They
’re like totally ordinary meatballs in tomato sauce.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, like she was taking a tone.

  ‘I feel like, for the past twenty-four hours, or whatever it is, I’ve been engaged in this basically constant low-level warfare and I don’t know why.’

  ‘Maybe because you’re picking fights with everybody.’

  ‘Is that what I’m doing?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jean.’

  After a moment, she said: ‘It’s like I get a kind of culture shock when I hang out with our family again.’

  ‘Well, you’re not a kid anymore. You’re used to being on your own.’

  ‘That’s not what it is. It’s because everyone else has kids, it’s like the ground has shifted. You don’t see it happening because you’re part of the problem. I’m not really blaming anybody.’ Again, he didn’t respond, and she eventually said: ‘Dana told me she told you.’

  ‘Yes, she told me about it.’

  ‘Am I a bad human being?’

  ‘You’re not a bad human being.’

  ‘You don’t sound very convinced,’ Jean said. ‘You’re not saying anything.’

  ‘I’m thinking. Whether people change because of what they do. Maybe they don’t change.’

  ‘But what I’m doing is wrong …’

  ‘I don’t know, Jean. What do you think?’

  She felt tired and teary, but all she said was, ‘Does Susie know?’

  ‘Yes, she knows. I told her.’ But this time, he broke the silence. ‘What were you fighting with Nathan about?’

  ‘The problem of evil.’ He laughed, too close to the mouthpiece, it sounded a little static, and she said, ‘Did you know about the Drone Memo? It’s possible they cited one of Nathan’s articles.’

  ‘No. I mean, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nathan wouldn’t admit to anything. I feel like something is happening to all of us that I don’t like.’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said. ‘I can see that.’

  The cars kept coming, stopping and coming again, they left streaks of light across her eyes, the rhythm was the rhythm of falling asleep – she felt it in her legs, too, in the weight of her body against the brick wall.