Paper is White

by Hilary Zaid

  As soon as Mi’Chelle left, the telephone started ringing. It had already been an emotional day. I didn’t know if I could handle any more. “Hey, Stranger.” I couldn’t place the voice, a young woman’s. Only two young women ever called me at the office—Fiona and Francine. Fiona was long gone. And Francine?

  My mind hung in the space between familiarity and recognition for an audible beat. But my heart, which had beat its slow, relentless dirge for the past two weeks, quickened.

  “I haven’t been away that long, have I?” asked Jill.

  “I’ve never heard your voice on the phone before,” I fudged.

  “I’ve been so unbelievably busy,” Jill started, misunderstanding.

  “No, it’s okay,” I cut in, before she could apologize for not calling. “Me, too.” I sat back in my chair. Same lonely Chagall print. Same old pile of magazines. Same old picture of Francine. Meanwhile, Jill had schlepped across the continent, started a new job, become a professor, object, no doubt, of a thousand crushes.

  “I’m in San Francisco.” Jill’s voice rose over a sudden wave of other voices. “At Mid-Century and Beyond.” At one point, a conference like that would be something Annie Talbot would have encouraged me to attend. “It’s crazy,” Jill said. “I’m moderating three panels and giving a paper.”

  “Wow.”

  “Listen,” she cut in, “I don’t think I can break away here. But I was wondering if you might be able to come to the hotel after my panel this afternoon.” Then she added, “If it’s okay with the Mrs.” I glanced at Francine’s photo on my desk.

  “She’s not the Mrs. yet,” I answered.

  Jill laughed. I didn’t.

  Neither one of us said anything.

  “Oh,” Jill said.

  ( )

  The lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Union Square buzzed with the catchphrases of my forgotten, academic tongue. “If it were up to the New Historicists . . . ,” a coiffed professorial type intoned, addressing her retinue. I could hear loud laughter as they disappeared down the hall. Grad students in Dockers and Oxford shirts in strange, shimmery blues glided along under twinkling chandeliers like fish in a tank. Thank god, I sucked in a breath, I didn’t know any of them anymore.

  Just then, Jill’s sleek, dark head appeared around the corner. She was wearing a long, tan sweater jacket that fell open in the front; a necklace made of tiny steel dice gathered in the hollow at the base of her throat.

  Jill and I fell into our own conspiratorial conversation, pressing shoulders as we wandered through the halls, gossiping about the professors in Jill’s department, about people we both knew. Her face shone. As I talked to her, I tried to ignore the fact that Jill, in her long, tan coat and black boots, looked beautiful. Instead, I found myself blurting out the news of Sheva’s death, confessing finally to my extreme over-involvement. Just telling Jill the entire truth felt like a betrayal of Francine. But why did that matter, when I’d already been accused of it?

  “Are you going to tell Anya that Batsheva is dead?” As always, Jill went straight to the heart of it.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I feel like it’s my fault. For all those years, Anya probably thought Batsheva had died—an escape plan gone wrong—and then, when I told her that Sheva had submitted a death record for Anya, after the War was over, I resurrected her. Am I going to kill her now? And make her wonder why, after all this time, they never found each other before it was too late?”

  Jill nodded thoughtfully. We’d made our way toward the hotel café and we let ourselves be jostled along toward the front of the line. “You don’t think it’s possible, do you, Ellen,” Jill fixed her eyes on mine, “that two people who really love each other could knowingly spend their entire lives apart?”

  I squinted under the hard light of Jill’s stare, and couldn’t decide whether I felt stripped, or seen, or both. Maybe I did need to believe that it’s impossible for two lovers to deny a burning spark for a lifetime. Because, then, by some reverse math, it couldn’t be possible to hide a lack of love for a lifetime, either, and Betty’s note would have to be a lie. I was focusing on Anya and Batsheva, on Betty and Sol. But maybe I was purposely overlooking something else, something right in front of me.

  I turned away from Jill. There, down the corridor that led toward one of the hotel’s many ballrooms, Annie Talbot stared back.

  My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I stepped out of the line and walked, trancelike, toward Annie Talbot’s face.

  “Ellen!” Jill called after me.

  “Professor Oey!” a voice called out, and I heard Jill respond.

  I stepped into the dark, spotlit hall, through the intermittent light, down the hush of the carpeted corridor toward my lost adviser’s face.

  It was Annie Talbot. Bigger than life. Propped on a tripod, a placard announced the publication of her last, posthumous book: Martyrs to a Cause. Below it, a caption announced, “Annie Talbot’s Brilliant Final Study of Self-Sacrifice” and a talk at 3 p.m. that day by one of the professors who had given a eulogy at her memorial service. Once again, I’d come too late.

  Jill caught me by the sleeve. “Did you know her?”

  I turned to Jill in the near dark, my face palpably ashen. “She was my adviser.”

  I heard the murmur of Jill’s name. “Professor Oey!” a pursuing voice called out.

  “Come on.” Jill grabbed my arm and started walking fast down the hall, away from the café and the plates piled with field greens, away from the voices of her students, away from the looming, unchanged face of Annie Talbot. At the other end of the hall, a green light beckoned: Exit.

  Jill led me into the stairwell and up, floor after floor, through a dark corridor, past an abandoned room service cart and a heap of white towels, toward the elevator. We burst out onto the rooftop garden, the entire city laid out beneath us like the model of a city, and breathed.

  Jill told me about her mother, who lived alone in New York and wanted Jill to come back. “First, it was just the Jewish thing. Now it’s everything.” Then Jill, who had just published a three-part article on social responsibility for The Journal of Genocide Studies, said, “Sometimes I do regret,” flicking the long belt of her tan sweater, “that our moral fabric depends so heavily on the expectations of other people.”

  It seemed Jill and I stood, at that moment, just balanced on the skin of the earth. If you fix your eye long enough on some terrible, reason-defying scene—a mountain of shoes, for example, or a ravine, deep enough to conceal villages of the dead—your mind can go, eventually, to nihilism. You can go down into the meaningless dark, the dark that swallowed Primo Levi, that swallowed Annie Talbot. But it can go the other way, too: toward the manic freedom of the kind that lets you do anything you want, untethered by a world without meaning, without consequence, without God. It can happen to any of us.

  What would it be like, I wondered, watching the Bay Bridge strung out over the dark gray gap, just now twinkling with light, to let go of Annie Talbot and her unquenchable depression—to turn back the clock, for a day or two, on Sol and his broken heart, on Betty and her secrets—to simply forget, just for a few hours, about me and Francine? What would it be like to give up the depressed kind of nihilism for the manic? To give in to the wild freedom of a world without meaning?

  Jill and I stared out at the lights of the City. To the west, a white, obscuring fog hung low over the surface of the water, promising to obliterate the day’s details; the towers of the Golden Gate hovered, unanchored, in the air. We stood over the city, watching each precise object—car, rooftop, suspension tower—turn into the shadow of itself.

  Jill stood up, her sweater falling long behind her, and we walked silently back to the stairwell, side by side. When we got to Room 832, Jill paused. “This is me,” she said. The hair from her bun stuck out at odd angles behind her smooth, dark head, the perfect symmetry of her teeth. Then she cocked her head into the nondescript bedroom, whose curtains hadn’t yet been drawn against
the night city. She tilted her head toward the big window through which the fading city looked ordered and still. She said, “Come in.”

  ( )

  Something always shifts in September, a morning every year that feels like school starting, a different kind of morning dark, when you wake up and realize: Summer’s over. That was the day we found the letter from Betty, tucked in the flurry of fall circulars, postmarked Honolulu.

  “Are you going to open it?”

  Francine just looked at the envelope. In the corner, where the return address goes, Betty had written her and Sol’s address in Berkeley. “Not yet,” she answered, picking at the envelope with her nail.

  We sat looking out the back window for a while. “I’m going to L.A. tomorrow.”

  Francine’s head whipped around so fast, I thought she might turn into butter. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that Francine would be surprised by this news—maybe because I’d felt like we were so far apart at this point, real distance hardly mattered. Maybe because I’d already been accused of cheating, it didn’t feel like betrayal. But I could see right away—before she’d managed to make her mouth look resolute—that she felt stricken, as if I’d actually struck her.

  “I’m sorry,” I backpedaled. “It, it just came up.” (I’d gotten a call at the office that morning from a guy named Jeff Katz, “about a project we’re starting here out of L.A. The world’s largest database of testimony from the Shoah. We’re looking for experienced oral historians to join our team.”)

  “It’s just for the weekend.” I didn’t mention that it was a job interview. But, faced with the proof of my desertion—she’d known it, all along—Francine had already drawn back into herself, determined not to care. If only I’d recognized that stoicism for the terrified vulnerability that it was, we might have closed our distance, right then and there.

  Instead, I found myself throwing dress clothes into a suitcase, contemplating a life hundreds of miles away from her. “How long will you be in L.A.?” Francine asked. She was lying on our bed, paging through The New Yorker while I packed.

  As weird as the prospect of returning to L.A. seemed—really returning—it was nowhere as awful as the prospect of having a life in the Bay Area without Francine.

  “Until Tuesday,” I said, stacking up three clean shirts. “Listen,” I told her. “I’m interviewing for a job.” Then I added, as if it wasn’t clear, “In L.A.”

  “Oh,” Francine said; she’d looked up from the magazine. “You don’t like L.A.”

  “I like L.A.,” I countered. “I just don’t want to live in L.A. again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But if you and I aren’t going to get married, I don’t want to be here. I can’t stay here if we’re not together.” As I lifted my black pants out of the bottom drawer, I tried not to imagine lifting out all of my clothes, packing all of my books, separating all of the things Francine and I shared and taking all of them away. I had never been able to pull off goodbye without leaving.

  “Is this an ultimatum?” Francine rolled up the magazine, over and over, as it turned in her hands.

  “Getting married—that’s an ultimatum. You can’t decide to spend the rest of your life with someone—you can’t go through all of what we’ve been through to get ready for that—and then undecide it. We can’t go back and act like none of that happened.”

  “You don’t have to yell,” Francine said quietly, pulling her curls back from her face with both hands. The magazine lay on the bed, defeated. “But you’re right—” Outside, a car radio played the new Alanis Morissette song. “I need to think about it,” she admitted, finally.

  “Well, I’ll be gone for two days.” I shoved my shirts into the case. “You can think about it all you like.”

  “Okay,” she said simply.

  You’re uninvited, Alanis sang. Then someone turned the car off and, outside on the sidewalk, the door slammed shut.

  ( )

  The interview went ridiculously well. Which is to say, they offered me the job on the spot. “Do you have a family?” the woman—there was a whole team—asked me as she handed me the official packet. “We expect to have a lot, a lot of travel.” Israel, Poland, England. A brilliant, career-boosting job, an ideal job for a single person. I’d be leaving Anya, too.

  I didn’t say anything about the wedding to my parents when I met them in Westwood that afternoon. Though, desperately miserable and miserably desperate, I’d wanted nothing more than an authentic, maternal voice to say, “I’m so, so sorry. It will all be okay.” (Lured by the siren call of that hallucinated voice, I had already told my mother that Betty had left. My mother was in the pied-a-terre in Laguna Beach, packing for spring in Sydney. She didn’t mince words: “You know, Ellen, children from broken homes are much more likely to get divorced themselves. Statistically speaking.” My mother’s voice was crisp. She was folding freshly ironed linen into neat, pastel squares. “You don’t have to go through with this. It’s not too late.”)

  Fortunately, during lunch, my mother didn’t say anything negative about Francine. They didn’t say anything about Francine at all. I think they were hoping that if they just never mentioned Francine, the whole thing, wedding and all, would go away.

  As we waited for the salade des tomates et mozzarella, my father, who had been listening intently to the conversation at the next table, leaned in to my mother and whispered, “You have some jam on your lips.” It was their secret code; it meant, “I’m eavesdropping; I’ll tell you later.” Then my father went on talking investments; my mother nodded along.

  I thought about Charlie May and his millions; who said I needed to stay in scholarship at all? Maybe I’d peel off, like Charlie May, and make piles of money, and Francine would read about me in the Business section and feel deep regret.

  “Have you thought about selling real estate on the internet?” I asked my father. These people, after all, might be all I had left.

  “The internet.” My mother made a pinched face. “It’s just a craze.”

  My father slid an envelope across the table. “This is the money we promised you.” For my wedding. He said it like I was holding someone he loved hostage. How ironic that they were giving it to me now, when it was probably too late.

  I kissed my parents goodbye at the big lot on Wilshire, knowing that I wouldn’t see them again until they’d come back from the other side of the planet, just in the nick of time for the wedding—or, possibly, just in time for nothing at all. Standing at the corner, my mother clutched me fiercely in both arms, as if trying to squeeze out the last few drops of something, then turned and walked away with my father without a second look.

  ( )

  Out the airplane window, rolling brown foothills divided Hayward from the East. “Slam dunk.” That’s what the head of the Voices project had said; my graduate work in history, plus my professional experience, made it a “slam dunk.” Could I come back for a kick-off meeting in October?

  October. Our wedding date loomed, close as the rising hills, just four weeks away, all the big pieces in place, all the little pieces—pick up the rings, the shoes—hovering in the air like a swarm of bees, poised for the cue to swirl together into a single, directed vector of concentrated focus. But everything had stopped, and those little pieces, those hovering bits, now threatened to break apart. I peered out the window at the pink and white salt flats. I’d already begun to turn my despair into something like that, huge and salt-filled and dead, but beautiful, seen from a distance. We’d be landing in minutes.

  I zipped Tipping the Velvet into my backpack and put the tray table up. Would Francine be home when I got there? Was I heading home right now? Or were the poles of my life about to reverse? I wasn’t sure I could become an Angeleno again. I wouldn’t be going back, I told myself. I’d be starting over. Maybe, I thought, as I shuffled off the plane behind a line of impatient commuters.

  Someone grabbed my elbow; the passengers disembarking behind me mumbled obsce
nities and parted around us. “Ellen,” Francine panted. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She looked pale, white on white.

  “What’s wrong?” Had Sol done something desperate? Had he had a heart attack? Could our situation possibly get any worse?

  Francine steered me toward an empty gate. Outside the big windows, the sun had just begun to set. “There was a crash,” she said. “A bad one.”

  I didn’t understand. Sol? Who? I gripped her arm.

  “A plane crash,” the words rushed out of Francine’s mouth. “Just now.”

  Outside the window, an empty baggage train rolled past. I imagined Francine rushing to the airport to find out if I was alive or dead. I wondered if she was relieved, or disappointed.

  Francine wiped her nose. “I’m not really explaining this well. The whole time you were gone, I couldn’t stop thinking about that goddamned note. I needed to figure it out: Could I ever say to myself, or to you—” Francine fixed her gaze on me “—I never loved you, you never loved me?” Over the PA, Boarding Group A got called to gate 23. “I called my mother last night.”

  Francine looked at the flat brown carpeting. “I expected her to have some kind of answer, but, from the minute I called, it was all chitchat.” Francine kicked at my bag with her foot. Her voice dropped to a fierce whisper. “I was so pissed. She didn’t even mention my dad. Finally, I told her off, Ellen. I told her she needed to take responsibility for what she’d done to our family.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Ha. Said she’d done that long enough, thanks. Said she knew it would take time, but I’d get over my anger. It’s like she was just done with being my dad’s wife, and done with being our mom, too, I guess. It’s like she’s gone insane.”