We sat in the living room—Yoav and I each in a high-backed chair, and Weisz on a pale silk sofa. The walking stick with the silver handle, a ram’s head with curled horns, rested on the cushion beside him. Yoav’s gaze remained fixed on his father, as if being in his presence demanded all of his focus and concentration. Weisz presented Leah with a box tied in ribbon. When she opened it, a silvery dress fell out. Try it, Weisz insisted. She carried it off draped over her arm. When she returned, transformed into something lithe that shimmered and reflected light, she was carrying a tray with a glass of orange juice and bowl of soup for her father. You like it? Weisz demanded. Eh, Yoav? Doesn’t she look beautiful? Leah smiled thinly and kissed her father’s cheek, but I knew she would never wear it, that it would be relegated to the back of her closet with all of the other dresses her father had bought. It struck me as strange that, with everything Weisz seemed to know about his daughter’s life, he hadn’t yet understood that she had no interest in the extravagant clothes he always bought for her, clothes for a life she didn’t lead.
While he ate, Weisz asked his children questions to which they replied diligently. He knew about Leah’s upcoming recital, and that she was now working on a Liszt transcription of a Bach cantata. Also that one of her music teachers, a Russian who’d taught Evgeny Kissin, had taken a leave of absence and been replaced by another. He asked about the new teacher, where he came from, whether he was good, whether she liked him, and listened to the answers with a gravity that struck me—listened, it seemed, with the suggestion that if his daughter’s answers had implied anything less than her complete contentment, those responsible would have him to answer to, as if, with a single phone call, a dangled threat, he were capable of arranging for the poor new teacher to be sent away, and for the departed Russian, recovering from a breakdown in the south of France, to be forced back into service. Leah went to lengths to assure her father that the new teacher was excellent. When he asked her whether she had plans for the weekend, she said she was going to a birthday party for her friend Amalia. But I had never heard of any Amalia, and in all my time at the house I’d never known Leah to go out to any parties.
There was little of his children in his elongated, sagging features. Or if there had once been, it had been distorted beyond recognition by all that had happened to him in life. His lips were thin, the watery eyes hooded, the veins in his temples lumpy and blue. Only the nose was the same, long, with the high, curved nostrils that were permanently flared. If Yoav and Leah’s auburn hair had come from him it was impossible to say: what was left of his was thin and washed of color, combed back from the high, smooth forehead. No, the burden of his inheritance was not easily detectable in his children’s faces.
Satisfied with Leah’s answers, Weisz turned to Yoav and asked about the preparations for his exams. Yoav’s answers were fluent and polished, as if he were reciting something he had composed in anticipation of such an interview. Like Leah, he made every effort to assure his father that things were going as well as they could, that there was no cause for alarm or worry. Listening to him, I was amazed. I knew perfectly well that Yoav thought his tutor was an arrogant fraud, and that the tutor, in turn, was threatening to put Yoav on academic probation if he didn’t turn in some tangible evidence of the work he claimed to be doing. He lied with grace, without the slightest hint of guilt, and I wondered whether, if the need arose, he could lie like that to me. But worse than that, as I watched Weisz hungrily spoon the soup into his mouth holding the utensil between his long crooked fingers, I was filled with guilt about the lies I’d been telling my own parents. Not only about all of the wonderful things I was supposedly doing at Oxford, but that I was there at all. Exploiting my father’s constitutional inability to pass up a money-saving deal, I made up a story about a cheap method of calling the States using a special phone card. In this way, I’d orchestrated it so that instead of their calling me every Sunday, I called them. They were creatures of habit, and I knew they wouldn’t break from ritual unless something was wrong. To be sure, I called my answering machine on Little Clarendon Street every night. Thinking of them as I sat before Weisz, how they must have waited anxiously by the phone each Sunday morning, my mother at her station in the kitchen and my father in the bedroom, I felt a gnawing regret and sadness.
At last Weisz wiped his mouth and turned to me. A trickle of sweat slid down the hollow in my chest. And you, Isabel? What do you study? Literature, I said. An odd smile cracked across his bloodless lips. Literature, Weisz repeated, as if he were trying to put a face together with a name he knew from long ago.
During the next quarter of an hour Weisz interrogated me about my studies, where I came from, where my parents were from and what they did, and why I had come to England. At least those were how the questions were worded, but in truth (or so I believed) the words out of Weisz’s mouth were only a code for something else he wished to uncover. I felt as if I were trying to pass a test whose requirements were hidden from me, and struggled for the right answers, feeling that with each fanciful arrangement of the truth I was further trampling the love and dedication of my parents. I had lied to my parents, and now I was lying about them. Weisz took the shape of their representative, the counsel assigned to the poor and downtrodden who can’t be relied on to defend themselves. As we spoke, all the sad and noble furniture in the room fell away, the Bavarian grandfather clock and the marble table, even Yoav and Leah, and all that was left in that cold and cavernous space was Weisz and me, and somewhere, hovering on a higher plane, my wronged and injured parents. He makes shoes? Weisz asked. What kind of shoes? From the description I gave of my father’s business, one could have been forgiven for thinking that Manolo Blahnik came on bended knees to my father when in need of someone to manufacture his most extravagant, complicated designs. The truth was that he produced the uniform shoes for nuns and Catholic schoolgirls in Harlem. As I went on exaggerating my father’s business, imbuing it with glamour and prestige, a memory came to me of an afternoon spent in my grandfather’s old factory, which my father had carried on overseeing until it was run into the ground, and his only choice was to become a middleman between Harlem and the belching factories of China. I remembered how my father had hoisted me up to sit at his giant Herman Miller desk, while on the other side of the wall the machines clattered nervously under his command.
That night I slept in a narrow cot in a small room down the hallway from Leah’s bedroom. I lay awake, and now that I was alone I was overcome first by humiliation, then fury. Who was Weisz to interrogate me, to make me feel I had to prove my worth? What business was it of his who my family was and what my father did for a living? It was bad enough that he cowed his own children into such a pathetic position, rendering them unable to strike out in their own lives. Bad enough that he had succeeded in coercing them into a form of confinement of his own design, a condition they didn’t resist because it was not within the realm of possibility for them to refuse their father. He ruled over them not with an iron fist or a temper, but rather with the unspoken threat, much more haunting, of the consequences of even the slightest discord. Now I had appeared to challenge Weisz’s order, to unbalance the delicate triangle of the Family Weisz. And he had spared no time in making clear that I was wrong if I thought Yoav and I could go about our relationship without his knowledge or consent. What right did he have? I thought angrily, tossing in the narrow bed. He might be able to control his children, but I wouldn’t allow him to bully me. Let him try: I wouldn’t be frightened off so easily.
As if on cue, suddenly the door creaked open and Yoav was on me, coming at me from all sides like a pack of wolves. After we’d finished with every other orifice, he turned me over and forced himself into me. It was the first time we’d done it like that. I had to bite my pillow so as not to scream out at the first thrust. When it was over I fell back asleep against the heat of his body, a deep sleep from which I woke alone. Whatever I’d been dreaming receded, and all I could remember was finding Weisz
hanging upside down in the pantry like a bat.
It was almost seven in the morning. I got dressed and washed my face in the child-sized Victorian sink decorated with pink flowers in Leah’s bathroom. Tiptoeing down the hall, I paused in front of her room. The door was ajar, and through it I could see the enormous virginal white canopy bed, a bed as large and majestic as a ship, and thinking of it so I imagined her sitting aloft it in flooded waters. Standing there I suddenly knew that it, too, must have been a gift from her father, one that carried the same subtle message about the sort of life he expected her to live. She never brought home friends, though surely she must have had some at the college. Nor had I ever heard her make reference to a boyfriend, past or present. The demands her father and brother made on her loyalty and love left any outside relationship with a man almost impossible. I thought of the birthday party Leah had invented the night before. I hadn’t understood the point of such a gratuitous lie, but now I wondered whether it was her only way of resisting her father.
Yoav was still asleep in his bed on the floor below. My fury from the night before had abated and with it my confidence. I wondered again how long our relationship could last. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Weisz won. I’d forced Yoav into the first battle with his father over me and no sooner had he entered it than he had forfeited, grown pliant like a little boy, and then come at me in the dark with teeth and claws. The image of the hanging Weisz returned to me. Does one ever get free of such a father?
I wrote Yoav a note and left it on his desk, eager to get out of the house before I ran into Weisz. It was still drizzling outside, the fog low and heavy, and by the time I reached the station the damp had seeped through the coat my mother had bought for me. I took the Tube to Marble Arch, and from there I caught the bus back to Oxford. As soon as I unlocked the door of my room a crushing sadness descended on me. Away from Yoav, my life in Belsize Park took on the uncertain quality of a play whose stage could be dismantled, its players disbanded, and the heroine left alone in her street clothes in the darkened theater. I crawled under the blankets and slept for hours. Yoav didn’t call that day or the next. Not knowing what else to do, I dragged myself to the Phoenix where I watched Wings of Desire twice. It was dark by the time I walked home along Walton Street. I fell asleep waiting for the phone to ring. I hadn’t eaten all day, and at three in the morning the gnawing in my stomach woke me. All I had was a bar of chocolate, which only made me hungrier.
For three days the telephone didn’t ring. I slept, or sat immobile in my room, or dragged myself to the Phoenix where I sat for hours in front of the flickering screen. I tried not to think, and lived on a diet of popcorn and candy that I bought from the incurious punk anarchist who ran the concession stand, to whom I felt gratitude for possessing principles that approved of whiling away one’s days alone in a cinema. Often he gave me free candy or a large soda when I’d only paid for a small. If I’d really believed things between Yoav and me had come to an end I would have been in far worse shape. No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculous reversal.
At some point the telephone finally did ring. One sentence ends and another always begins, though not always in the place the last one left off, not always continuous with the old conditions. Come back, Yoav said in something close to a whisper. Please come back to me. When I unlocked the door in Belsize Park, the house was dark. I saw his profile illuminated by the bluish glow of the television. He was watching a Kieślowski film we’d seen at least twenty times. It was the scene where Irène Jacob goes to Jean-Louis Trintignant’s house for the first time to return the dog she’d hit with her car, and finds the old man eavesdropping on his neighbors’ telephone calls. What were you, she asks, disgusted, a cop? Worse, he says, a judge. I slid onto the couch next to Yoav, and he pulled me to him without a word. He was alone in the house. Later I found out that their father had sent Leah to New York to retrieve a desk he had spent four decades searching for. In the week that she was gone, Yoav and I fucked all over the house, on every imaginable piece of furniture. He said nothing more about his father, but there was a violence in the way he wanted me, and I knew that something painful had taken place between them. One night, always a light sleeper, I woke suddenly with the feeling that a shadow had passed over us in silence, and when I crept down the stairs and turned on the hall light Leah was standing there with the strangest look on her face, a look I’d never seen before, as if she had cut the fraying ties to whatever had moored us. We had underestimated her, but no one more so than her father.
II
TRUE KINDNESS
WHERE ARE YOU, DOV? It’s past dawn already. God knows what you do out there among the grasses and nettles. Any moment now you’ll appear at the gate covered in burrs. For ten days we’ve lived together under the same roof as we have not for twenty-five years, and you’ve hardly said a thing. No, that isn’t true. There was the one long monologue about the construction down the road, something about drainpipes and sinkholes. I began to suspect it was a code for something else you were trying to tell me. About your health, perhaps? Or our collective health, father and son’s? I tried to follow but you lost me. I was thrown from the horse, my boy. Left behind in the sewage. I made the mistake of telling you as much, and a pained look gripped your face before you reverted back to silence. Afterwards I began to suspect that it had been a test you’d concocted for me, one for which the only possible outcome was my failure, leaving you free to curl back into yourself like a snail, to go on blaming and despising me.
Ten days together in this house, and the most we’ve done is stake out our territories and inaugurate a set of rituals. To give us a foothold. To give us direction, like the illuminated strips in the aisles of emergency-stricken planes. Every night I turn in before you, and every morning, no matter how early I rise, you are awake before me. I see your long gray form bent over the newspaper. I cough before entering the kitchen, so as not to surprise you. You boil the water, setting out two cups. We read, grunt, belch. I ask if you want toast. You refuse me. You are above even food now. Or is it the blackened crusts you object to? Toasting was always your mother’s job. With my mouth full, I talk about the news. Silently, you wipe the sputtered crumbs and continue to read. My words, to you, are atmospheric at most: they come through vaguely, like the twitter of birds and the creak of the old trees, and, as far as I can tell, like these things they require no response from you. After breakfast, you retire to your room to sleep, exhausted from your nighttime rambling. Close to noon you appear in the garden with your book to stake out the only lawn chair whose seat has not broken. I claim the easy chair in front of the TV. Yesterday I followed the news report of an obese woman who died in Sfat. She hadn’t moved from her sofa for over a decade, and when they discovered her dead they found that her skin had grafted to it. How it was possible for things to have gotten so far—this they didn’t get into. The report was limited to the fact that she had to be cut loose from the sofa, and hoisted through the window with a crane. The reporter narrated the slow descent of the enormous body wrapped in black plastic because, as a final humiliation, there was no body bag in all of Israel big enough to fit her. At two sharp you reenter the house for your solitary monk’s meal: a banana, a cup of yogurt, and a meek salad. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will appear in a hair shirt. At two-fifteen, I fall asleep in my chair. At four, I wake to the sound of whatever odd job you have chosen for yourself that day—clearing out the shed, raking, mending the roof gutter—as if to earn your lodging. To keep things fair and square, so that you won’t owe me. At five, I summarize the late-breaking news to you over tea. I wait for an opening, a crack in the hard glaze of your silence. You wait for me to finish, wash out the cups, dry them, and return them to the cupboard. You fold the dish towel. You remind me of someone who walks backwards, sweeping away his footsteps. You go up to your room and close
the door. Yesterday I stood and listened. What did I think I would hear? The scratching of a pen? But there was nothing. At seven you emerge to watch the news. At eight I eat dinner. At nine-thirty, I go to sleep. Much later, perhaps close to two or three in the morning, you leave the house to walk. In the dark, in the hills, in the woods. I no longer wake with a hunger that drives me out of bed to gorge myself before the open refrigerator. That appetite, which your mother called biblical, abandoned me long ago. Now I wake for other reasons. Weak bladder. Mysterious pains. Potential heart attacks. Clots. And always I find your bed empty and neatly made. I return to bed and when I get up in the morning, no matter how early, I find your shoes lined up by the door and your long gray form bent over the table. And I cough so that we can begin again.
Listen, Dov. Because I’m only going to say this once: We’re running out of time, you and I. No matter how miserable your life may be, there is still more time left for you. You can do what you wish with it. You can waste it wandering the forest, following a trail of turds left by a burrowing animal. But not I. I’m rapidly approaching my end. I will not come back in the form of migrating birds, or pollen dust, or some ugly, debased creature befitting my sins. All that I am, all that I was, will harden over into ancient geology. And you will be left alone with it. Alone with what I was, with what we were, and alone with your pain that will no longer stand any chance of being allayed. So think carefully. Think long and hard. Because if you came here to be confirmed in what you have always believed about me, you’re bound to succeed. I’ll even help you, my boy. I’ll be the prick you always took me to be. It’s true that it comes easily to me. Who knows, perhaps it will even excuse you from regret. But make no mistake: While I’m buried in a hole void of all feeling, you will live on in an afterlife of pain.
Great House Page 18
