by Rebecca Lee
And as we now pulled it out, an oaky, forest-floor smell filled the kitchen. “The beast emerges,” John said. One thing I loved about John’s novel, beneath all my possibly irrational rage about the female characters, was his romantic, bohemian ideas about life’s pleasures—food, trees, words, gestures. His mother was from a long line of extremely cultivated East Coast women, mostly all living in Manhattan, who used their wealth and privilege as a means to appreciate life. At our wedding, John’s aunt had read a Rilke poem, which included those famous lines about marriage—that in it “two solitudes protect and greet each other.” It had seemed almost comical to me at the time, that that could possibly be what a family was, a “shelter for the soul’s independence.” I knew it as a big, semiangry group of people griping at and with each other continually, though in a way that could seem life affirming. In my experience, you would no more expect to find peace within a family than you would expect to find it in yourself.
Our marriage was happy, I believed, though there were some puzzles in it, one of which occurred almost immediately. Our honeymoon had been at a place in Ireland called County Clanagh. The first day we were there we went out sightseeing, and while I placed a call back home from the car, John went out walking. When I emerged, I saw him crouched down in the middle of a field. This field grew out of not dirt, but pebbles really. It surprised me that anything could grow out of those stones, but there was a bright-green grass that seemed to be thriving, and a lot of bluebells. To the left there were great hills, and to our right a cliff that semicircled around us and fell to an enormous angry shoreline, busy with churning. I couldn’t imagine why John was kneeling there. “Are you okay?” I shouted into the wind, over the ocean, and then as I picked my way across the rocks, a line from H.D., whom I hadn’t read since college, rose up to me, “At least I have the flowers of myself.” When I reached John, I touched his shoulder, and when he turned to look at me, he was crying.
I had asked him why, and when he didn’t answer, I hadn’t ever asked again, a fact that as it turns out I was mistakenly proud of. I felt like I was respecting the mystery of another person, maybe, and that this harsh landscape was the perfect place to learn my first lesson of marriage, an austere little lesson. And yet County Clanagh had haunted our marriage a little, mostly because it was a little sad for reasons I couldn’t comprehend and felt I shouldn’t disturb.
After John and I had set the food on the table, Frances came in from the balcony and I introduced her to the Donner-Nilsons.
“Donner as in Donner Family?” Frances asked as she shook Kitty’s hand.
“Actually, yes,” Kitty said.
Frances would find the book in anybody; she would shake it out of a person. “Which of the Donners do you descend from?” Frances asked.
“George and Tamsen,” Kitty said.
“Tamsen’s my favorite!” I said. I’d seen a ballet about the Donners at the Met in 2001. Tamsen was the great matriarch of the family, losing herself finally in a little lean-to, alongside the vicious Keseberg. They’d been stranded for weeks when the cannibalism set it, yet still Tamsen was so vigorous and organized that she labeled all the flesh in jars, so that family members could avoid their own family.
“There was no cannibalism,” Kitty said. She knew what we were all thinking.
“What?” I blurted out. That was the main thing, the cannibalism.
“There’s no evidence in the fossil record.”
It was sort of disappointing, actually. Apparently the new thinking among some archeologists was that there wasn’t enough forensic evidence—knife marks on the bones, essentially—to support a conclusion of cannibalism.
“I still watch myself,” Ray said. “I watch my back.”
I DID NOT WISH to be one of those “work wives,” women who take up with a married coworker and, while not sleeping with him, take on other very wifely duties—keeping track of him throughout the day, establishing inside jokes, noting his food and drink preferences, texting messages en francais back and forth all day. But Ray and I had been working on the Tran case so closely for the past four months that it had necessitated spending inordinate amounts of time together, sometimes deep into the night. I had come to rely on Ray’s intelligence and good sense of humor. He was in general such a decent guy, very sympathetic to Duong Tran, very funny, very warm, and hard working.
One night, about a month before the dinner party, Ray and I were holed up in our conference room, eating chow mein, trying to find our way through the eye of the needle, that is, making a way for Duong Tran to stay out of jail. Duong was facing a possible twenty years in prison if we went to court, whereas opposing counsel was now offering us a settlement of two years. I couldn’t bear to allow Duong to enter prison. He’d already lost his wife and had a two-year-old baby to support. He was a very earnest, very stubborn man, set in his ways, which were somewhat strange. His beliefs sounded bizarre to me, but then again so did my own, if said aloud. Essentially, the Hmong believed that the gods had to be appeased and sometimes this involved offering a living sacrifice in place of a person, to balance out the forces of life and death on earth. And who was I to say what was superstition: I didn’t know. In fact, that was my whole legal argument. It’s cruel to punish a man for doing what he considered the best on behalf of his wife. All the precedents for this, unfortunately, involve cases of legal insanity and I didn’t think it would go well in court to call four centuries of Hmong religious thinking insanity.
I did think people should just leave him alone, and I thought the law should enforce this. He was grief-stricken by the death of his wife. It’s true he hadn’t given her the beta-blockers and blood pressure medication she had required (and more problematically, had flushed all the medication down the toilet), but Duong had, as a sign of his love and devotion, hauled a squealing seven-year-old pig up the four flights of stairs to their Brooklyn apartment and butchered it right there in front of her.
Ray thought we should settle and I could not agree to it, so we were still working on the case at two a.m., delirious from exhaustion. Adding to the anxiety of the night, Ray’s wife kept calling his cell phone, and it would whirr and vibrate on the table periodically, spinning around angrily. I pictured her at home, holding the baby in one arm, throwing down her cell with the other hand when he wouldn’t answer.
At some point, we drifted into pure silence, right after Ray said, “Well, I think your decision means he’ll go to prison then for the full twenty.” And into that silence, there was a little light rapping at the door. I thought it had to be Kitty. We both turned toward it, and then Lakshmi peered her head around the corner. She smiled and held out a little white bag. “Late-night Danish?” she asked.
What the hell was Lakshmi doing here with a little Danish in a bag? I knew what that little Danish meant to them; I had been newly in love once. It was unbelievable that somebody would go to Hammerstein’s around the corner and pick out a jelly Danish and bring it out of the night into the harsh incandescence of our offices and hand it to you. It was irresistible, of course, it represented the whole world outside our sterile, deadlocked conference room, the ongoing life of midtown even deep into the middle of the night, its letting on to the East River, which flows south to downtown, where everyone is always free. But get a clue, Ray. Your wife is at home with a baby.
As Ray conferred with Lakshmi in the hallway, I sat inside the room, waiting, growing more furious by the second. The phone rang again, and without really looking, I opened the door and thrust it out toward Ray. “It’s your wife,” I said, and with my pregnant belly I was better able to represent all the wives and mothers of the world. Lakshmi smiled kindly at me, though, as beautiful as ever, unruffled, happy, in love.
JOHN TOOK TO CUTTING the meat, and Kitty turned to Ray. “Meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat,” she said, many more times than seemed amusing or rational. At first I had thought she was just being kind of cute, or silly. Maybe just suddenly exuberant? She s
pent essentially all day every day with her baby so maybe she was only breaking free a little bit amid the adults, without really remembering how, but then as the “meats” continued, her voice revealed a little bit of harshness or even madness in those short syllables. So she knew about Ray and Lakshmi? A part of her knew, and it was making the rest of her crazy, was my diagnosis. She was going to lose her mind if she said one more “meat.” Everybody smiled nervously.
Finally Kitty turned to the rest of us, her eyes brimming with light and tears, and gave us this nonexplanation. “Ray has been reading a book about women and power that says that women’s needs for iron, especially during their periods or after childbirth, is the basis of civilization as we know it. Particularly after childbirth, women generally couldn’t procure meat, so they had to trust men to do it.”
We all nodded, all of us silent and afraid.
“So women were forced to invent civilization, to surround themselves with stability during their weakest moments and the moments of their children’s most terrible vulnerability.”
“Women invented civilization then?” John said.
“Well, yes. But they invented it through men.”
“It sounds like a lot of trouble.”
“It was,” Kitty said, demurely.
So she knew? This conversation seemed constructed explicitly to torture a cheating husband. Right? She was bereft of the very thing she and her child needed, and he was not fulfilling his duties as a man. But Ray was munching away on my mother’s mince de déjeuner casserole, a hearty, simple dish whose secret ingredient was Lipton’s chicken noodle soup mixed with root vegetables.
“And time, too, we invented time,” Kitty said.
At which point Susan leaped into the conversation, lecturing us on time expanding and then constricting when you are losing your limb over the frozen steppes of Nepal. Apparently when blood leaks out of a body, the body loses its pulsing internal clock, and all understanding of time is released. The soul becomes loosed from the body and unhinged from time simultaneously and begins to rove freely about. There is nothing more beautiful, Susan said, than dying. The end is joy. This little lecture briefly distracted us from the Donner-Nilson marital problems, and by the time Susan was done, Kitty was escaping out to the balcony, her whole body hunched forward as if to hide and comfort herself. Somebody had to tell her.
AS THE TABLE STAYED riveted to Susan’s recounting of the attack—the bobcat spotting her from hundreds of feet away, stalking her through the foothills, coming upon her kneeling over a small pond, and placing his paw on her shoulder as if to say, politely, Hello?—I followed Kitty out to the balcony, where she stood gripping the railing. “I feel fine out here,” she said to me. She was staring out over the city, the rain falling softly into it. “I wish I could just stand out here forever.”
“Is everything all right?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “It is. I’m just a wreck, though. I should feel so grateful but ever since I had the baby, I’ve been falling apart. I can’t seem to pull myself together.”
“I can imagine how a new mother would feel that way,” I said.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “I’m sure it will be different for you.”
“Oh no, no, don’t worry.”
“Every day just seems so empty.”
“Is there anything that helps?”
“I guess, yes. Maybe Ray helps a little. But I’ve been so awful to him. I’m angry all the time, or sad. I just don’t know what to do with myself. I’m so sorry,” she said, and then stared out at the city.
The city never disappoints, John frequently said when we set out on an excursion, even a tiny one to the drugstore or for a walk around the park. It was true. Kitty and I both looked out at it now—the lights, its long winding roads, the million interiors. It doesn’t know what you want so it tries to give you everything. It was October, the most beautiful month of the year, and even in the city tonight, and under a light rain, you could smell the burning—leaves, grass, the earth, everything golden burning up, surrendering before winter arrives. I looked back in at the candlelit table; people were in high spirits, and nobody seemed to mind that two of the women were out weeping on the balcony. Except then I did catch Ray’s eye, and he seemed to shrink away a little. Good.
“LET’S JUST GO OUT there right now and tell her, in front of him,” Lizbet said. She and I were in the kitchen, preparing the trifle, and Kitty was back at the table, tucked up against Ray.
“Don’t tell her now,” I said. “Don’t tell her in the middle of the dinner.”
“This party is like a torture chamber for her.”
I agreed with Lizbet that Kitty needed to know, but I couldn’t bear for her to be told right now. “Some women don’t want to know,” I said. “Who knows what sort of arrangement they have?”
“I’m pretty sure they have a normal arrangement along the lines of not sleeping with other people.”
“I suppose. But the dream of a happy family can be so overpowering that people will often put up with a lot to approximate it. Sometimes a little blindness keeps the family together.”
“Well, then tear the family to pieces if it requires that.”
“I guess, but you know—children and all.”
“People need to have fewer children if what they do is just keep us all in lockstep.”
“I know,” I said. “I used to think about what was happening in, like, Kosovo, but now I’m researching baby gates deep into the night.”
“Oh my god. Are you going to get one of those plastic playgrounds in your backyard?”
“Except that I don’t have a backyard.”
“It’s kind of a drag for the rest of us when people have children.”
“It’s just that you don’t want to use your child as a scythe to break through the forest of received opinion.”
“That sounds like an okay use of a child,” Lizbet said.
None of this was surprising from Lizbet. You could trust her to hold out against any received opinions, as it was sort of the way Lizbet herself was raised. Her mother, Hanna, had gotten pregnant at twenty-seven, by accident. In fact, there was a still an IUD in Hanna’s uterus when she discovered she was pregnant, and it was too dangerous to remove it, so Lizbet grew in the womb alongside the little piece of barbed wire, an almost impossibility, and a fact that we were all strangely proud of.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’m going to go crazy if I have to listen to Susan anymore.”
“She’s smart,” Lizbet said.
“I don’t even believe there was a bobcat.”
“What?”
“Seriously. A bobcat isn’t really even big enough to tear off a woman’s arm. Bobcats are quite cute and little.”
“You think she made it up, are you crazy?”
“Made what up?” John said, entering the kitchen.
“The bobcat,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“We gotta somehow look up her sleeve,” Lizbet said, “and see the type of scar it is.”
“You two are crazy. You need to not spend time alone together.”
I handed him the huge, chilled trifle and he carried it like a big baby into the dining room, where it was greeted with shouts of happiness.
EVERY DINNER PARTY BY the end is a bit of a defeat. After the halfway mark, when everybody is still in high-spirits, some even intoxicated, and the dessert still hasn’t arrived, there is a moment when it seems like we are the most interesting dinner party in Manhattan tonight, we love each other, and we should do this all the time, why don’t we do this all the time? Everybody is calculating when they can invite everybody to their house for the next dinner party.
But then there is the subtle shift downward. Somebody is a little too drunk. The bird, which was a bronze talismanic centerpiece, golden and thriving, is revealed as a collection of crazy bones. A single line from the archeologist Ernest Becker often tore through my mind at the end of long mea
ls, that every man stands over a pile of mangled bones and declares life good.
I had learned from my mother, who was an exquisite hostess, that it was important to provide small, gradual treats—little chocolates and liqueurs, after the meal, so that as the night decelerates there is no despair.
There was the trifle, and then fortune cookies, and then John brought in mango.
The alcohol had left Susan nostalgic for the bobcat and her time on the mountain. “What I missed the most,” she said, “while I lay there, aware now that my arm would most likely have to be amputated, if I didn’t die right there, going in and out of consciousness, what I missed the most was this, the ritual of dinner, the sitting down to sup together.”
Oh my god. I looked over at Lizbet and knew she would repeat “sup together” for the rest of our lives.
“It is written inside us,” Susan said, “to have dinner with our friends. As I crouched down, and he breathed at my back, I went through all the great meals of my life, one by one. The fish at the wharf in my childhood, the beef bourguignon in Falstaff, my grandmother’s creampuffs, one by one.”
“When you say ‘bobcat,’ ” I said, “are you meaning it metaphorically or actually?”
“Both,” Susan said. “I picture it as the fright of your life.”
“But when you say ‘bobcat’ most of us are picturing a really big, ferocious animal.”
“And that’s fine,” she said.
But Frances, as the book’s editor, took offense. She sighed and said, bored, “Actually, literature needs to be read as literature, not gone thudding through like one would a law brief.”
There was a knock at the door; I leaped up. “That’s the Tran decision,” I said. I’d asked the night secretary at the firm to bring it over the minute it arrived.
“It’ll be the manuscript,” Frances said. She said it with such certainty that I half expected a breathless Salman at the door, delivering it himself.
But it was neither, though the Tran case would be settled the next day, with Duong forced to abandon his little boy, and Salman’s memoir would get published and it actually would explain our times and it would find joy where none previously was. It was just a plain woman at the door, in a long overcoat, asking for my husband. It was such a startling request, and standing there, she formed the perfect answer to the question that was County Clanagh. Unlike the Donner-Nilson marriage, whose dysfunction would turn out to be, deep down, part of its durability—Kitty’s solicitude interlocking nicely with Ray’s narcissism—our marriage would break apart within months. And when it did, I would understand Susan’s book a little better because nothing could describe what was happening, my little boy, just a few months old, already cut loose from the nuclear family—a little spaceman adrift, his parents also cast to the heavens.
