Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  These last two days, she’d sometimes thought she was only pretending her marriage was over, but now she felt the kind of fear she’d experienced not when she first realized that her bag was not on the dresser, but when she continued not to see it, when certainty replaced anxiety. “I’m talking about you, Jerry,” she said, and she was now sitting up, legs crossed, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “I’m talking about being willing to consider being different.”

  “How can anybody be different?”

  “I can be different. I can at least consider being different.”

  “You mean giving up my trips?” said Jerry. “You’ll stay married to me if I give up my trips?”

  She hadn’t put it to herself that way, and she didn’t want to know what he’d say if she said yes. She didn’t want to hear him say that he’d give her up rather than give up the trips. She was cold. She leaned forward and pulled the blanket around her, making a tent that covered her head. Inside, it was dark, but if she could sit in the dark she’d know what to say. The receiver’s cord made an opening in the tent.

  For a moment she wanted to tell Jerry about Marlene’s letters—and about the argument—but she knew she wouldn’t. It would all be part of the archive of separation, the eventually large body of what would not be common knowledge between them. Common property would be hard enough to sort out, but common knowledge…it was sad to think of the jokes they’d lose.

  She said, “If I’d found out—if I’d overheard you and Joanna discussing it, and if I had asked you very seriously not to let her go, would you have changed your mind?”

  “We didn’t discuss it when you were in the house,” he said.

  “I know, but if.”

  “I wouldn’t have invited her if I couldn’t have done it privately.”

  “You’re not private about the trips. You leave your cards everywhere.”

  “I’m private about some parts. I don’t write everything down,” he said. She was hot, now. She shook off the tent of blanket, and gleams of light came from the window and from the hall, where there was a nightlight. “Why can’t you compromise?” she said. “I think I’d be all right if I could understand why you can’t compromise about anything. That’s what I’m saying,” she said. “I’d reconsider everything except those two things. You reconsider nothing. It’s not just the trips. You reconsider nothing.”

  “I don’t?”

  “I want to go to sleep.”

  “Maybe I don’t know how to reconsider. I don’t think I consider, in the first place,” said Jerry.

  “You sound pleased with yourself. I don’t think it’s anything to be particularly proud of.”

  He ignored what she said, but had become interested in the topic. “I don’t think I make decisions,” he continued. “I think they come to me ready-made. I couldn’t reconsider—I’d have to know how they began, so as to begin them differently.”

  “Did you ever try?”

  There was such a long pause that she thought he’d gone to sleep, and she considered putting down the receiver. Then he said in a low, uncertain voice, “I don’t know.”

  She started to speak, but he kept talking. “If we separate,” he said shakily, “will Joanna be all right?”

  “She won’t like it. But she might be less surprised than you and I,” Con said.

  Another long pause. “She’d be mostly with you?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t want Joanna to live with him, she noted, though he claimed to think so highly of her. And Con did want her daughter to live with her.

  “Do you mind if I talk to her about it?” he said.

  “Don’t,” said Con quickly. “Not yet.”

  Again there was a long silence, while she wondered if he was talking from the room where Joanna slept, or somewhere else. Again she grew cold. This time she lay down under the blankets, but still held the receiver to her ear. She didn’t know what she hoped Jerry would say.

  “Maybe it’s time to be apart for a while,” he said at last. “It’s going to be hard to figure out.”

  “You reconsidered?” She was joking, in a way.

  “Maybe not.”

  “I still love you,” said Con, though she had thought she didn’t.

  “I love you too.”

  “It’s terribly, terribly sad,” she said, as if it were a story about other people.

  “The saddest of sad,” he said. “Good night, dear.”

  She hung up and wept in the bed, but then she slept soundly. When she awoke it was light, and for a moment she didn’t understand that her mother’s phone was ringing again. Then she thought Jerry had called her back and had been dialing all night. All night the phone had been ringing, and yet the machine hadn’t picked up. She wondered why not, and thought that possibly someone had broken into the apartment again and had taken the answering machine. Then the ringing stopped and the announcement began in the other room, and she understood that she’d slept through only two or three rings. She picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

  Her mother’s voice, once again, explained as if it might be surprising news that she wasn’t home right then, and pronounced numbers. “Hello?” said Con. “Can you hear me? I don’t know how to stop the machine.”

  “It’s me,” said Marlene. Then more loudly. “It’s me. Your friend Marlene.”

  “I know,” said Con. “What time is it?”

  Marlene sounded stymied. The machine stopped and there was a beep. “I don’t know. About nine.”

  “I was asleep. Look, about last night—”

  “Never mind about that. Sweetheart, I have to tell you something,” said Marlene, and Con understood that if Marlene sounded strange, it wasn’t because of their argument.

  “Is something wrong?” said Con. Then, involuntarily, “Joanna?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Con. “What is it?”

  “Connie—I don’t know how to tell you,” said Marlene. “Connie. Sweetheart,” she said. “Gert. Your mother.”

  “What?” Con said, with the start of a scream.

  “Connie, she died—she’s dead. I found her dead in my house.”

  “No!” Con shouted, and then, “You can’t say that, it’s not true.”

  When Con stopped making sounds, Marlene was in the middle of a sentence and she continued to talk. She said, “It’s for the best” but it was not for the best. It was true, however. A doctor had said so. Marlene had already called a funeral home and they were coming for the body. “It’s going to be complicated, getting her wherever you want her—New York, I assume. Where is your father?”

  “He’s dead,” Con said, and it took her a while to understand that Marlene wanted to know where her father was buried.

  Finally she said, “I’ll call you back,” because she was afraid she might faint. Con hung up the phone and went to the bathroom. Her mother’s copy of Prevention was still next to the toilet, still open to the article about oat bran. Then she got back into her mother’s bed. She turned onto her stomach and breathed the smell of the bed—her own smell, her mother’s perhaps still—and then she just lay there. She was sure the news wasn’t true, but if it wasn’t true, there would be no reason to say it, so it had to be true. She didn’t cry and didn’t sleep. Her body hurt—her shoulders, her arms, her legs—and she lay as still as she could. She thought only in short sentences. It was impossible to think anything that made sense, anything she might think in a week or even a day. She was aware of light coming through the window, and the cat, who had emerged from some hiding place during the night and was sleeping near her. Now he jumped heavily off the bed, and soon she heard him scratching in his litter box in the bathroom. He returned, and wanted to sleep on her head. She pushed him aside and he tried again, but after that he slept on the blanket pressed against the protuberance that was Con’s buttocks. She wondered when she would get up, when she would want to eat, as if she were someone else watching herself. An hour passed.

  S
he had to pee again, and finally got out of bed. Her bare feet were cold. She returned to the bed and sat on the edge. For a long time she thought about warming her feet and at last, with what seemed like all her energy, she stood up, found the socks she’d worn the day before, and put them on. Then she put a sweater on over her pajamas—she was freezing—and went into the living room. It looked like a photograph of itself. When she saw the answering machine on the kitchen counter she knew it had recorded her entire conversation with Marlene. Then she wasn’t sure. She could press “announcement” and hear her mother’s voice, Gert’s unbearably trusting and needless repetition of the phone number. Con could not bring herself to hear her mother’s announcement. But she had to know if she and Marlene had been recorded.

  Con and Peggy met at an Italian restaurant not far from Peggy’s place, a long walk from Con’s, so she took a taxi. The waiters knew them by now and deferred to Peggy, who sometimes talked a little Italian with them. When Con was late, Peggy ordered a glass of wine and gossiped with the bartender, mostly about real estate in the neighborhood. Tonight Con was more than half an hour late. When she came in, the warmth was welcome, and small piercing lights picked up gleams in dark woodwork and tabletops. Peggy, looking more like a lifelong neighborhood woman than usual, was wearing a possibly too elaborate tight knitted sweater with silver around the V neck and a flower pattern. It made Con nostalgic.

  Peggy’s long thin nose had wrinkles at the top that softened her face, which would otherwise have been severe. She’d once told Con her whole career at NYU had come about because she had a scary face, so she could say no and get away with it. Con now caught her eye, slid into the seat facing the wall, and ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio when the waiter appeared at her elbow. She looked down at her own sweater. “You remind me of old Brooklyn,” she said.

  “Old Brooklyn?”

  “Women with lots of sisters and sisters-in-law,” she said. “Dressing up and getting together with family.”

  “We still do that,” Peggy said. Then, “I was just thinking about your mother.”

  “You were thinking about my mother?” Con said.

  “I was thinking about when you and I met, when she died.”

  “I don’t think about her death,” Con said. “I don’t like to think about it.”

  “I was remembering that when she died, I brought you lasagna my mother had made.”

  “Because she died? I don’t remember. I bet it was wonderful.”

  “I think the lasagna wasn’t particularly good but you were polite,” said Peggy.

  “You know what? Joanna showed up, just as I was leaving.”

  “You’re kidding. How did she get here so fast?”

  “The charges were dropped and she got a good flight.”

  “That’s good—but what will you do now?”

  “I’m not sure I need to do anything,” Con said.

  “Of course you do! She spent a night in jail!” said Peggy, her temper suddenly engaged.

  Con was not bothered when Peggy spoke sharply. She knew it was style, Brooklyn style. If Con had ever had that sharpness, the years in Philadelphia had worn it off.

  “That’s what Joanna says,” Con said. “But she was drunk. I think bartenders and cops are pretty careful—they know what’s legal.”

  “We don’t know she was drunk, and she had a right to speak even if she was.” The waiter was hovering again. Peggy opened her menu, and spoke quietly again, as if she’d made up her mind to postpone this topic. “The lasagna here is better than my mother’s,” she said. “You were so lost and sweet and young, that week.”

  “Was I?”

  “You seemed thirty years younger than I was.”

  “What’s the lasagna tonight?” said Con. The specials were scribbled on the blackboard.

  “Pumpkin, for the season,” Peggy said. “That sounds stupid.”

  “Big slabs of pumpkin, like butternut squash?” said Con. “Are you getting it?”

  “No.”

  Con felt young again, as she had apparently been all those years ago, young and naive and ignorant, too stupid to order the right thing in an Italian restaurant, insufficiently critical of Peggy’s dead mother’s lasagna. She tried to remember whether Peggy’s mother had cooked it for her on purpose because her own mother had died. She thought she and Peggy had met a few times when her mother was alive.

  “I didn’t think that would have happened—what happened to Joanna,” Peggy said. “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t think a girl would be arrested in a bar in this country for saying the war in Iraq is a bad idea.”

  “I know. Maybe it didn’t happen quite like that.”

  “She wouldn’t have lied,” said Peggy.

  This was true; Joanna didn’t lie or even exaggerate. Sometimes she made herself sound worse than she was. But she was confused about this incident. “If they asked her to leave, that’s legal,” said Con. “First the owner had to ask. Then the cops had to ask. I admit that she says they didn’t ask her to leave—that they told her to be quiet.”

  “Then you have to do something,” Peggy said.

  “What can I do?”

  “You’re a lawyer.”

  The waiter showed up. Con inquired of her taste buds and found she wanted pumpkin lasagna. Peggy had fish. They tore off bits of bread. They ate salad.

  “I don’t practice in North Carolina,” said Con. “That’s what Joanna said: ‘You’re a lawyer.’”

  “But you know how these things work. Maybe have a local lawyer write a letter?”

  The food arrived. The lasagna was wonderful. There was something she didn’t want to think about, something that had come up in this conversation. She liked the music in this restaurant. “Who’s that singing?” she said.

  “Barbara Cook?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s Barbara Cook. I know this recording,” said Peggy.

  “Okay, okay.”

  “And anyway, nobody else sounds like Barbara Cook.”

  “Okay,” said Con.

  “At least they turned off the radio and put on a tape,” Peggy said, fork in hand. “The news came on before you got here, and each story was worse than the one before. They’re activating more reserves and sending them to Iraq. Bush signed the ban on partial-birth abortions. Also, I didn’t quite get this, but there’s some kind of story that at the last minute, Iraq tried to avoid the war, and our guys just wouldn’t budge. They were just determined.”

  “I can’t stand to talk about it,” Con said. She tore up a piece of bread and ate it. She ordered a second glass of wine. Then she changed the subject. Peggy liked hearing about her work. She talked about employment discrimination against victims of domestic violence.

  It was unusual to feel bad when she was with Peggy, whose sharpness was kind, with the ease afforded by love. They often disagreed, and pretended to insult each other. Con felt prettier near Peggy, who took the trouble to look nice though she was older than Con. When Peggy was around nobody could say older women weren’t sexy. “I can’t wait to see Marlene,” she said. “What does she want to do?”

  “You’ll never guess. She wants to go to the El Greco show at the Met, and something at the City Opera. Turandot. I wonder if I can still get tickets.”

  “What a day!” said Peggy. “Buy me a ticket. And let’s bring Joanna. It will do her good.”

  “She won’t come. She doesn’t like Marlene.”

  They ordered coffee. Con had decaf but Peggy could still drink coffee right before bedtime. “What’s new at work?” Con said. They talked about that, and then about Peggy’s lover. Con always spoke of him as Paul, but his name was Phil.

  “I’ve been seeing Phil for two years,” said Peggy, “and you’ve said Paul every time you’ve mentioned him.”

  “He looks like a Paul.”

  “You met him once.”

  Phil’s wife was sick; she had aggressive breast cancer. “Oh, poor lady. Does that make him want to break up
with you?”

  “No, he needs to talk about it.”

  “Are you hoping she’ll die?” said Con, putting cream in her decaf.

  “What a thing to say! I care about her!”

  “Oh, come on,” said Con quickly. “You’ve been sleeping with her husband for two years!”

  “I care about her quite a bit.”

  “Don’t tell yourself what isn’t true, Peggy,” Con said. “You’ve been sleeping with married guys so long you’ve forgotten it’s not the basic reality, as if everybody came in threes: a man, his wife, his mistress.”

  “Isn’t that how it is?” said Peggy. She drank coffee black, but she stirred it first to cool it.

  “You think Jerry had lovers? Or Fred?”

  “What went wrong, if it wasn’t that?” Peggy stirred her coffee again, blew, tasted it and put the cup down. Still too hot. “I mean Jerry. Fred probably hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “Jerry’s coming tomorrow, I think,” Con said. She was certain he hadn’t had a lover.

  “Oh, right, you said. Staying for weeks and weeks. Well, it’s your life.”

  “A week. It’s one of his trips.”

  “Are you going to bring him to the opera?”

  “Oh, no, he’ll be busy.” Peggy sounded as if she thought it was stupid to let Jerry come, but Con was too tired to argue. She wanted to go home, not just because of Joanna.

  The waiter asked if they wanted anything more, and Peggy said, “Il conto, per favore.” They split the check, but as Con was shrugging into her jacket, Peggy said, “Wait a minute. There was a reason I was thinking about the week your mother died. Do you remember asking me about a man named Lou Braunstein?”

  “Asking you? No, I never heard of him.” She stood. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Toward the end of that week—the week your mother died—something upset you. Well, your mother died, of course that was terrible. But then something else upset you, and it had something to do with a man named Lou Braunstein. You wouldn’t tell me what it was, but you wanted to know if I knew anything about him, and I didn’t. But I wrote down the name. A few weeks ago I was cleaning out a drawer and there’s a piece of paper that says, ‘Lou Braunstein—find out and tell Con.’ And I remembered you asking me. We were outside, somewhere.”