I continued to buy time. “I’m still making calls. But at least I got him to move most of his junk into storage.”
“Who have you called?” Dhara wrapped the hair-dryer cord around the handle and put it away.
“Nursing homes. Those kinds of places. But they’re criminally expensive.”
“Are your brothers pitching in?”
“Not much.” I’d phoned them the other day. Michael offered a hundred bucks a month. Eric claimed he couldn’t afford half that, even if he wanted to. Both agreed that whatever they contributed, our father didn’t deserve it.
“It’s not fair how they stick you with everything,” Dhara said with irritation.
I wasn’t quick to defend my brothers. They lived in New York and Boston, so I saw them once a year at most, and we rarely made more than a nominal effort. Our father was our only link, one we too often forgot. But I couldn’t forget him at the moment, not when he was moving into this very apartment a couple days, a week, too soon from now.
“Why is this your responsibility? You’re the youngest. You’re supposed to get a free pass.” Dhara swept her hair into a ponytail, then pinned it up in a bun.
“It’s the same old story. They live far away and have too many kids.” Michael had three and Eric four. They both married only children and got to breeding in their twenties, to compensate for lonely childhoods. Their kids slept two to a room; space was so tight at Eric’s apartment that he turned a closet into a bedroom for his youngest boy, who slept on a tiny mattress and decorated the walls with decals of spaceships and planets. My brothers were priced out of the East Coast, on a public defender’s and assistant principal’s salary, and neither had any room at the inn. So it was all on me, and Dhara knew this, but that didn’t stop her from asking Why?
“So I heard there might be a vacancy at corporate coming down the pike,” she said. “One of the top marketing people got hired away by MirrorMirror. If the job gets posted, I think we should talk California again.”
I let out an audible sigh. We had talked California before; it was our greatest sticking point. To Dhara, the Midwest, though she’d been born and raised here, had always seemed a foreign place, a flat horizon with no reward at the end of it, and California the land of gold and poppies and a great bridge over the bay. To me, the Midwest was home, a parchment on which I might write stories; to leave would mean abandoning my material, letting go of my claim. “We can talk about it later. The timing isn’t great, with my father’s situation,” I said, and now shuddered at the thought of inviting him to move in: Vritra, the god of drought and destruction, Collyer Brothers Professor of Chaos, coming to Chicago to share our eight-hundred-square-foot apartment, where we didn’t have space for our own worldly goods. Our bedroom closet was so cram-jammed that I had to wrest my shirts off the rack; our storage cage, on the twentieth floor, was stacked higher than an ossuary; and most of our wedding gifts still sat in a vacant room in my in-laws’ motel. What had I got us into? How could I tell Dhara?
The most expensive restaurant in America had no sign out front. You could walk right past the gray brick townhouse and not know this was Alchemia, the five-star, Gourmet number one, James Beard Award–winning toughest reservation in town. Ever the long-term planner, Dhara had called a year ago, the day after our wedding, to get us a table. She’d been looking forward to this night ever since, reading blogs, checking online forums, downloading Alchemia’s changing menu of magical molecular gastronomy.
A lone doorman greeted us with a cunning smile and swiftly admitted us, as if into a Cold War hideout. Inside, we were alone in a long purgatorial hallway, lit orange and seeming to narrow to nothing but a wall. But as we neared the end of the corridor an automated door whispered open and a glimmering host and hostess appeared. “Mr. Clary. Ms. Patel,” the host said, “happy anniversary,” and took our coats. The hostess led us upstairs and seated us by a corner window in the white-walled, vase-and-stem-lined dining room. In the center of the table she placed two fresh sprigs of rosemary anchored and held aloft by metal cylinders. When she walked away, the scent of rosemary stirred in her wake.
Dhara asked if I wanted to go for the twelve-course tasting menu or the twenty-five-course tour. “They’re small bites,” she said, “like tapas for the gods.” I knew this was my first test of the night, so I said the tour, of course, ignoring the price—$250—and when she asked about the wine pairing, which was an additional $250, I held my tongue. All told: a thousand dollars for both of us. “Tour with pairing,” I said to our waiter, and snapped the menu closed.
A problem I had with upscale restaurants was that they made me feel like I was at church, on punishment, or a fraud. My suit felt wrinkled and secondhand. I got fidgety, like a boy, and quaffed the wine I was supposed to save for the first two courses. At the table next to us, four businessmen worried aloud about future junkets in the coming age of government oversight. They swallowed their food without pausing to admire how each piece was a mini postmodern sculpture.
Dhara and I were not the kind of couple who sat in silence across a table. Since I had her old job and we worked in the same office, with the same collection of wannabe-hipster engineers, we could have talked shop all night if we’d wanted to. But I found myself at a loss for words. And she seemed edgy as well. About California, no doubt. How I’d dismissed that conversation, kicked it down the road.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Dhara asked.
Our waiter arrived with the first course: char roe with parsnip cream, licorice foam, and ginger. The roe, we were told, had been retrieved from the Arctic by a friend of the chef, flown in overnight, and removed from the char in the Alchemia kitchen.
Ordinarily I couldn’t stand the first three ingredients, yet together the taste was miraculous, like a whole fish distilled into a single pearly bite. I realized I’d forgotten to raise a toast. “To the best year of my life,” I said.
Dhara narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’ve never been happier.” I lifted my glass higher.
Dhara’s glass didn’t leave the table. She tipped it in my direction. I lowered my glass to clink hers. “You look gorgeous,” I said.
And she was pretty, even with a scowl dulling her diamond face. And smart and quick, and she knew what she wanted and nobody got one past her. I didn’t deserve Dhara, and worried sometimes she’d wake up one morning and realize she could do better.
“It took you long enough,” she said. “I’ve been wearing this dress for hours.”
“I’m sorry. I was distracted.” And I left it at that, though I was wondering again about my father, telling myself not to ruin this, of all nights, when I found the next course—tips of white asparagus, which the waiter said took two years to grow—arranged on a plate in front of me like a side street in a city diorama.
Then we were halfway into dinner, and the meal was so transcendent that thoughts of my father and the stridor of the businessmen had fallen away. Each plate was custom-made to fit the course it was serving. Atop a stand the size of a chess piece sat a tidy square of pork belly. Along a plate in the shape of a winding river, sprigs of ice fish, horseradish, and parsley seemed to move as if swept in a current. Each glass of wine had a story. We’re going to take you now to the coast of Italy, outside the village of Praiano, where the vines grow on seaside walls and harvesters descend the cliffs on ropes, suspended high over the crashing surf, to pick the grapes.
Our waiter placed pillows in front of us and explained that they’d been filled with lavender-scented air. Atop each he rested a plate of slow-poached duck, wine-braised turnips, and mango puree. As we lifted each bite from the plate, the air slowly escaped the pillows, infusing the space around us with a soft lavender aroma. It was in the middle of this, the best course of the night, that Dhara said, out of nowhere, “Lucy called.”
I hadn’t heard from Lucy since graduate school. Last I knew she was still in Boston working for a big publishing house, climbing the rickety editoria
l ladder. She had e-mailed to say she’d begun to acquire books and I should keep her in mind when the time came to look for an editor. I knew she’d be disappointed to hear that I hadn’t written a word since my MFA and was working for the company that had become the bane of all print publishers. Still, I was curious to hear what she was up to.
“Did she say what she wants?” I asked.
“She left a message on the home phone.” Dhara lifted her napkin, folded it, and returned it to her lap.
“That’s strange. I’m sure she’s looking for someone’s number. We have friends in common.”
“How did she know where to reach you?”
“She probably assumed I’m still in Chicago and called directory assistance.”
“So you haven’t been in touch with her?”
“No.”
“I thought we agreed we wouldn’t keep our exes hanging around.”
“She called me. I haven’t spoken with her in years. She was my high-school girlfriend, Dhara.”
Two waiters, one at each end of our table, nimbly removed our plates and pillows and were gone too fast to cause a timely interruption.
“There’s no such thing as an innocent ex,” she continued.
“I haven’t a clue why she’d be calling,” I said.
I had rarely seen this side of her—jealousy over someone from so long ago. Perhaps I had reason for insecurity, but not Dhara. I wondered if she’d had too much to drink. But her eyes were sharp as pins.
When we first met, she was still grieving her mother, who had died of ovarian cancer in her fifties, and she was furious with her father for marrying a receptionist at the motel two years after burying his wife. Dhara and I had both lost our mothers and were baffled by our fathers, and she knew that just as I’d been around for her when it mattered, Lucy had been around for me. Could that explain the outburst?
“You once told me that Lucy was the love of your life,” Dhara said.
“I don’t remember saying that. When?” I asked.
“Before we were dating, during the confessional stage of the mating dance.”
“Well, if I ever said such a thing, I was wrong, because you are the love of my life. Isn’t it obvious?”
“Should you have to ask?”
“Dhara, listen to me: We’re in one of the finest restaurants in the world, in the city where we met. It’s New Year’s Day 2009, the year of Hope,” I said. “And it’s the first anniversary of our marriage, which was the best decision I ever made in my life.”
“Was it your decision?”
“It was our decision.”
“Do you ever wonder if it was the right decision?”
“What’s gotten into you? We shouldn’t be talking about a meaningless phone call. We should be talking about our wedding. Remember after the ceremony when we played that game?”
“You don’t even know what it’s called.”
“Give me a minute.” I hesitated. The name wasn’t coming to me.
“Aeki-Baki,” she said.
We’d limited the number of rituals and games at the wedding, but this one got a great laugh and had become a running joke with her family. One of the bridesmaids mixed a pot of water with milk and vermilion and threw a ring and some coins into the cloudy broth. Dhara and I were told that the first of us to fish out the ring four times would be the dominant one, ruler of the roost. While I kept coming up empty or with a useless coin, Dhara plucked out the ring four times in a row.
“You’re the empress and I’m the serf,” I said. “So why are you acting like this?”
But she’d lapsed into silence. She slid a palate cleanser onto her tongue. I sipped my wine, and my ears filled with the sound of the businessmen ordering single-estate cognac. More courses came by and we finished them without a word, and since the spell had been broken, the evening lost—all of this, I was quick to assure myself, through no fault of my own—I said, “My father’s moving in with us.”
She sat back in her chair.
“It’s only temporary. I need more time to get him situated. A month. Maybe two.”
She plunked down her glass of dry salted caramel, a space-age confection that expanded and softened in the mouth.
“We can’t afford a nursing home,” I continued. “But these last few days have made me realize he needs a nurse, or at least someone to make sure he’s taking his Coumadin.”
“We can’t afford one of those homes?” Dhara’s bottom lip was quivering. “You want to move him into my apartment?”
“Yes, we. We’re married. Not your apartment. Ours.”
I went on, trying to make my case. I said he was the only family I had and she of all people should understand that no matter what a thorn in the side he’d been, he was my father, and I couldn’t allow him to waste away because that’s what he’d do if I put him in some transient apartment in Normal. When I’d asked if he’d been to the doctor lately he’d laughed and said he was trying natural remedies, as in Let nature take its course. “And no, Dhara, I’m not overdramatizing when I tell you he’s never looked worse. Having a father is not like having a cat; they don’t just wander off when they get old, crawl under some neighbor’s porch, and exhale their last breath. Abandoning him now is something I refuse to live with.”
Dhara stopped me right there. “If your father moves in, I refuse to live with you.”
“Be reasonable.” I reached for the bill.
“It’s him or me,” she said. “Your choice.”
4
George never did go back to work that Friday. Lazar’s request that he return soon because “I’ve been meaning to tell you something” faded into a quiet corner of his mind. At the jewelry counter he wasted little time choosing a one-and-a-half-carat Marquise ring with a brilliant diamond in the middle and sparkling clusters at the edges. He paid five hundred dollars, a third of his annual salary, and exhausted most of his savings account. But no sooner had he bought the ring and called a coachman to take him and his precious cargo home in the safety of a covered landau than he began to worry that the ring was not impressive enough for the likes of Margaret Lazar.
At the boardinghouse he climbed the narrow staircase and sat at his desk. He took the ring from its velvet box and held it to the single gaslight that illuminated his Spartan quarters. The saleswoman had urged him to consider a larger diamond, of superior color and clarity, but given his uncertain future at work in the regime of Prove They Need It, he could not afford to go into debt. Though the ring might not have been the most expensive in the case, here, in George’s room, it glittered like an animate eye looking back at him. As the light ricocheted from facet to facet he told himself that of course the ring was good enough. How could Margaret expect anything more from one of her father’s employees, a salary-earner without name or fortune?
At the birthday party he had wanted to ask what she saw in him, but he was thrown by her confession, and such a question would have been foolish, anyway. She grew up with money; he grew up with none. No sense drawing attention to the fact. He would ask her to marry him, and she would say yes. He was good enough for her, good enough for anyone. But after he climbed into bed and pulled the layers of wool blankets up to his eyes, trying to warm his bones in these shoddy quarters that put up only the frailest resistance to the Chicago winter, he was beset with further doubts.
Through the thin walls a man and a woman—a streetcar conductor and his pregnant wife—were having an argument. They had gone at it before, and weren’t the only quarrelers at Ma Kavanagh’s. George had long ago learned to tune out his neighbors’ voices when he’d come home from work still adrift in the cartoon world of Tidy Town. And Ma, who lived in a top-floor apartment with her unmarried daughter, only rarely thumped her broom handle on the planks or yelled into the stairwell: Keep it down! Everyone turned a deaf ear to fights on the property, even to the sounds of men striking their wives, of plates crashing to the floor, and of the metronomic creaking of bedsprings that so often followed,
like defective apologies.
I told you we’re not leaving early, the streetcar conductor said. I put in for the weekend shift, and we can’t afford to give up the wages. Your mother will have to wait until Christmas Eve.
But we promised a longer visit this time, his wife said. You never let me go back to Belle Plaine.
If you had a job we wouldn’t be in this spot. But you’re too good for factory work. Like some kind of princess.
Some princess I am in this tenement, living with a man like you. Twenty-nine and already a curmudgeon.
You’d be one too if you worked my hours and put up with a thousand stinking straphangers after you with the push. But no, you sit by that window all day flipping through the Ward catalogue, decorating your mansion in the clouds.
At least I have a few dreams left, she said. When we met I thought you had ambition, but you’re all talk.
I’d find something better if I didn’t have to work morning and night. And now look what you’ve done: an ankle-biter on the way. Just what we need!
What I’ve done?
That’s right, he said. I took every care.
You took what you wanted and always have. You’re no better than a barnyard animal.
Something shattered. A picture frame? And a great scrambling could be heard, followed by the thud of an upended chair.
I never should have married you! she screamed. You’re the mistake of my life!
A door slammed. Heavy footsteps resounded in the hallway, then the falling scales of the conductor hustling down the stairs and out into the bitter night.
George lay awake wondering over the future of the child curled inside his neighbor’s belly. He would grow up in a boardinghouse so hastily constructed for the World’s Fair that cracks veined the walls and splinters widened dangerously in the sagging floorboards. The building should be condemned, George thought on freezing nights like this, and wondered anew why he continued to live in such a place, this scruffy urban cousin of the New Willard House. The streetcar conductor and his wife might well have been George’s own parents, squabbling over the vacancies and paths untaken. He clutched the velvet box beneath his pillow. Marriage. Was this what he had to look forward to?
The End of the Book Page 4
