A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  One of the small mysteries of life is why you get up when you do. For several minutes you lie there, telling yourself, I need to get up, and nothing happens. Then suddenly you’ve swung your legs over the edge of the bed. The self makes decisions without informing you. More of that Inner Game of Tennis bullshit, which in spite of himself Paul basically believed … another way that he had let his family down. First you drop out of Stanford, and then these are the ideas you pick up. He pissed in the bathroom, holding his dick lightly in his hands and feeling his bare feet on the tiles. And for some reason some of the old hopefulness, which he couldn’t help either, just the animal response to life, the current running through him, rose up. Everything ached less than usual. This is what happens when you ease up the day before. The muscles in the balls of his feet, his knees, the muscles in his thighs, his right shoulder, his elbow … It’s easier to keep the body happy than the soul. Something else Marcello used to tell him. He washed his hands and face and picked at his eyes a little, staring in the mirror, with water dripping off his brows. Trying to get the blepharitis off, between the lashes. A nervous habit, which was basically satisfying, because there was an end in sight. Between his thumb and forefinger he flicked the flakes of dandruff into the sink.

  Cal’s room was on the way to the kitchen, and for a second he stopped in the doorway to look in. He pushed the door gently open with the backs of his fingers. Dana was asleep in the single bed, her legs hung over the side and she had her face in the pillow. It’s very hard to not like someone when they’re asleep. She wore shorts and Paul could see, in one or two places, a tiny spidery explosion of veins on her thigh, which she felt self-conscious of and blamed on childbirth. A friend of hers had had them removed but they left a brown patch. Poor Dana. He felt distantly tender towards her, in the way you do towards someone you’re about to hurt, before they find out. The cot stood against the wall, making an L-shape with the bed. Cal lay with his head back and his mouth open. Part of what was touching about the position, which didn’t look very comfortable (his arms were thrown awkwardly outwards, as if in surprise), is that no sound came out.

  In the kitchen, where Paul fixed himself a bowl of cereal, the level early-morning light seemed strangely colorless. It reflected off the messy flashing of the apartment block roofs below and scattered against the raindrops on the wide sash window. Like a poked anthill, the city was beginning to stir. There was traffic coming down Broadway, you could hear the noise of trucks driving through wet, a few cab horns, and on the other side of the kitchen wall, the service lift in operation. Another Monday morning, at the end of summer; people going to work.

  *

  Nathan had a meeting at nine o’clock; he was busy enough that whenever he had a reason to be somewhere, he tried to fit in other reasons on the side. But the kids would have to come along. There was a woman he knew in grad school, another Rhodes scholar, named Sandy Franks. She had just come back from a session of the International Law Commission in Geneva. Her day-job, as she liked to call it, was teaching at Columbia, but there was also a Clinton connection. She had worked for Hillary in the State Department, and her husband, who was substantially older, sat on the Advisory Board of the Democratic National Committee. In term-time, he moonlighted at the Business School. He was basically a hedge-fund guy, who had retired at fifty, divorced his first wife (their daughters were in college), and gotten involved in politics, which is how he met Sandy. They didn’t have kids of their own.

  Sandy suggested Community Food and Juice, near Columbia. It was basically around the corner from her office (she lived somewhere on Lexington, across the Park), and that way she could get some breakfast on her way in. Nathan resented the implication that she was making time for him, but what are you going to do. He generally had mixed feelings about this woman. At Oxford Nathan thought of her as a not-very-serious person. There were two basic categories of people and she belonged to the wrong one. But since grad school he had started to revise and expand his sense of the different kinds of intelligence. There were people who got things done, and Sandy had made the most of moderate intellectual ability – she did her homework, she followed through, she made connections. She made sacrifices, too, and spent her first six years after law school working with Senator Briscoe, the ranking Democrat on Ways and Means. You can’t go from there to an academic job (she started at Georgetown before moving to Columbia) without putting in the hours. It’s not a bad idea to keep in touch with people like that. He also thought it likely that Hillary was going to run in 2016, that she would probably win, and that Sandy by that point might offer real access to the President. So he gave her a call.

  Community Food and Juice turned out to be the kind of place he tended to avoid: one of those organic coffee shops that overcharges for uninteresting food and bad coffee, where the barista is probably some college kid. (Nathan was sometimes tempted to go behind the bar and make it himself.) Most of the tables were communal, but they had a few plastic four-seaters under the awning outside, so he asked the waitress for a cloth and started drying the chairs. The weather was on the cool side for late summer, overcast but pleasant enough. Sandy was late and he set up Margot with paper and crayons – Julie could read her Laura Ingalls Wilder. And they could order what they liked. If you drag them along to this kind of thing, you have to let them win the small battles.

  When Sandy showed up, he remembered why he disliked her. Her business-like efficient friendliness, very American, which is how it seemed to him at Oxford – she used superlatives without enthusiasm or irony. It’s wonderful to see you again. And these are your beautiful kids. Sandy’s step-daughters were both in their twenties. The younger one had just had a baby (the boyfriend, whom nobody approved of, was luckily out of the picture), and she was learning what it was like to help out. The laugh she laughed she must have laughed a dozen times before. It’s amazing how quickly certain intimacies become public currency. But it’s also true that for a childless married woman, who has just turned the corner of forty, you need some kind of protection against sympathy. You need stories to fill the gap made by what hasn’t happened to you.

  Mostly they talked about other things – the ILC, for example. Sandy had chaired a Working Group on the immunity of state officials, and Nathan was good at asking intelligent questions, even in subject areas of which he had no prior knowledge. In fact, she said, the trouble with these committees is that they rely too much on agreement; nothing gets done. It’s one of the problems of internationalism, it produces bureaucracy. The minutes just … for some of these people you get the sense, the whole purpose is to add to the minutes. Nathan himself was working on an article about terrorism and the law: how the rule of law was applied to and affected by non-state actors, and how in turn the obligations of the state might adapt to the presence of new powers of surveillance. There were also privacy issues about the ways in which governments shared information. Margot while they talked was testing the slope of the table by letting one of her crayons roll down, but Julie had started listening to these conversations.

  Sandy kept referring back to Oxford. ‘The way we lived. It was only two years of my life, but …’

  The food arrived; she had ordered a bran muffin and a flat white. The coffee turned out to be not bad – Nathan had a double espresso. Julie stared, visibly shocked, at her eggs Benedict. She was experimenting, trying new things in restaurants, and usually ended up not finishing her plate, feeling annoyed at herself and slightly hungry.

  ‘It was just so … civilized,’ Sandy went on. ‘I keep thinking, that’s the kind of nation state I’d like to be a part of.’

  Nathan couldn’t figure out what she was trying to prove – making him jump through the hoop of reminiscence. ‘I don’t know. The place was full of pettiness and narrow-mindedness. And also the lowest kind of intellectual snobbery. But I met some smart people.’

  ‘Just walking to the Bodleian every day. Sitting in the reading room.’

  ‘The New York Public Librar
y isn’t bad.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I suppose it’s because in those days I could read what I wanted to. I didn’t think of it as a business.’

  ‘It always seemed like a business to me. Maybe a different kind of business. Plato was in business. Rawls was in the same business as Plato.’ But he knew that this kind of arrogance was part of his appeal and felt slightly ashamed.

  Julie, listening, could feel that her father didn’t like this woman – she didn’t like her either. Her face was covered in fine powder, practically the same color as her hair. In her matching lilac jacket and skirt, she was one of those people who looked like a cake in the window, not quite real. Clémence, Julie’s mother, never wore make-up, except sometimes a little dark red lipstick that showed very brightly on her darkish skin. A few of the girls she knew in school had started to play around with eyeliner and foundation; some of them wore earrings, too. But Julie wasn’t interested. There’s a reason boys don’t wear make-up, and it’s not because they’re missing out, she figured. She didn’t understand why Nathan wanted this woman to like him.

  But Nathan himself was changing his mind about Sandy. She had read, or read extracts and reviews of, Bobbitt’s book, The Shield of Achilles, about the death of the nation state – she knew his editor at Knopf. And last year at Davos, Tony Blair said to her … but it wasn’t so much what he said as the fact that this is what he wanted to talk about. It’s a mistake to think that ideas have no influence, that intellectuals don’t matter. These people read books, she said. Or they listen to people who read books. The closer you get to real power the more you realize that it functions like other forms of power you’ve already known. In the faculty lounge, for example. She seemed very sure of herself, of the rules of her world. Part of the problem with talking to insiders is that you end up playing the whole conversation on their home court. And yet her face under the make-up also showed a kind of brittleness; someone more naturally confident wouldn’t lay it on so thick.

  In spite of himself (somehow he couldn’t help it), Nathan mentioned his meeting with Michael Labro from the Justice Department. Sandy knew him, too; she said he had a difficult relationship with the Attorney General but wouldn’t elaborate. In his private practice days, Holder used to be a partner at Covington & Burling – they did some work for the NFL, and her husband had a connection there that meant they sometimes ended up at the same events. ‘He likes to talk sports.’

  ‘That’s not the sense I got,’ Nathan said. ‘I mean, about Labro and Holder. In any case, for me, it’s just a means to an end.’ But you can’t win these games; even in his own ears it sounded like posturing.

  ‘The Justice Department’s a mess,’ she told him. ‘It’s too big, it’s too political, and all the power lines are tangled up. Everybody’s scrambling.’ Later, she added, ‘If we’re talking about what I think we’re talking about, you need to be careful what you put in print. But you know that; you don’t need me to tell you.’

  Nathan, his eyes flicking back and forth, not nervously but restlessly, felt chastened somehow. When you seek out certain kinds of success you expose yourself to a lot of good advice. And not just advice but you actually learn to respect people you don’t particularly want to respect. A crumb of muffin, a flake of bran, had stuck in the powder on Sandy’s cheek, near the corner of her mouth. (Julie had been watching it with fascination.) After Sandy finished eating, she took a compact from her purse and in front of them all examined herself briefly in the small round mirror. She adjusted her hair, she brushed the crumb off, and looked up at Nathan, smiling – the meeting was over.

  Margot had started to act up anyway. She was licking her knife and sticking it in the jam jar, so Nathan called for the bill, which Sandy insisted on paying. Julie, suddenly impressed, said thank you very sweetly, even though she hadn’t finished her eggs. She felt bad about leaving so much on her plate. It made an impression on her, a woman in a suit who pays for your breakfast. They ended up walking Sandy back to campus. Nathan felt vaguely that he was giving in to something, her greater importance. It’s not clear how these fights get lost, but you know afterwards, you can see the score. Margot kept putting her feet on her father’s good shoes. She felt tired after their late night and wanted to walk like that, step by step. Eventually, Nathan lifted her onto his shoulders. He liked having a kid on his head. As if to say, look, I’ve got other fish to fry.

  They parted at the entrance to Columbia – a statue, with stony flowing robes and a book in his hand, presided between a hedge and a gate. A few students were already walking out and in, though classes didn’t start until the following week.

  ‘Maybe,’ Sandy said to Julie, breaking the silence, ‘that’s where you’ll go to school one day.’ When she wasn’t sitting down, you could see how short she was: Julie could look her in the eye.

  ‘I’m going to Harvard,’ she said. ‘Because that’s where Nathan teaches. We get a discount.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ her father cut in; but he was pleased, too, because on some level she was standing up for him. ‘You don’t have to worry about any of this yet.’

  Sandy smiled again. ‘If you want I can talk to a friend of mine at the OLC. I take it that’s what you’re interested in?’

  Nathan, awkwardly, ducked his head; he couldn’t quite look at her. But he said thank you and kissed her powdery cheek, English-style. For a few seconds they watched her walking along the footpath between the lawns, slowly diminishing, just another short, brisk middle-aged woman in a suit.

  As an adult, when Julie talked about her father, first at university, and later, to her own children, and finally after his death, she described him as the most rational human being she had ever known … It was a joke, because she knew this made her family seem crazy. But she also meant, the fairest, the most just. Even as a child, some feeling based on that thought was growing in her. The whole weekend stuck in her mind, for various reasons. Sandy became an occasional figure in their lives – in fact, she helped Julie after graduation get an internship on Capitol Hill. But she also thought, there are people in the world you have to be nice to, whether you want to or not. Realizing this, that Nathan was ‘being nice’ for some personal reason of his own, upset her at the time; it colored the rest of her day. There were other undercurrents, too, like Paul’s retirement. By glimpses and stages you become aware of adult life. Paul looked like her father, they sounded almost identical over the phone, and sometimes they talked the same. They said the same kind of things, probably because Paul was copying Nathan. And she remembered feeling jealous, on her father’s behalf, because the whole point of everybody getting together was to watch Paul. That’s why Jean had flown in from London, that’s why Bill and Liesel had flown in from Austin, that’s why Susie and Ben had taken the train from Hartford, and why Nathan had driven them down from Boston. To watch him play tennis.

  *

  They were supposed to meet the others at Times Square, at eleven thirty on the platform of the 7 train, which gave them half an hour to kill. So Nathan and the kids wandered around the Columbia campus. He showed them the Butler Library, and they spent a few minutes throwing pennies down the broad steps, trying to get them to land on a particular one. Nathan, when he wanted to, could draw on a large store of small inventions – games and tricks you pick up in the course of a long childhood, as the oldest of four kids. Then they walked back to the subway stop and caught the local down to 42nd Street.

  Emerging from the first train, Nathan kept hold of Margot’s hand. He had to pull her slightly, up the staircase from the red line, towards the central concourse, and down a series of tunnels, and then more stairs. There were too many people, most of them moving in the same direction, but in a slightly zombie-like way, taking short steps, shuffling, always straight ahead, until they ran into something and bounced off, and kept going at an adjusted angle. In addition to the usual craziness of the city, you could already see the US Open craziness, a lot of USTA merchandise on display, T-shirts a
nd golf caps. Margot noticed a boy carrying an enormous tennis ball, as big as a basketball, and scribbled over in felt-tip. She poked Julie, and then Julie saw Bill, staring at her unseeing and then looking anxiously around the station and over her head.

  ‘Bill,’ she said, and then, trusting her voice. ‘Bill! Bill!’

  A train stood waiting with open doors, but they couldn’t get everyone together in time, and so, much to Bill’s annoyance, they watched it depart. ‘Maybe we should split up,’ he said, ‘and try to go in separate carriages.’ Because their group was too large: Susie and Ben, Bill and Liesel, Jean, Nathan, Margot, Julie. Trying to squeeze eight people at a time, two with bad knees, three of them kids, through the same set of doors wasn’t easy. At least Dana and Cal were making their own way. She was taking a cab: Paul had insisted. Bill also had a heavy tote bag over his shoulder, filled with sandwiches and fruit and other things, nuts and bagel chips, which he had picked up from Zabar’s that morning. The food at the Open was overpriced and not very good. And this way, if anyone was hungry, and they found a seat, they could eat on the train.