The World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  But if she was amazing, why does she feel remorse running through her? She told her sister off, said the things she has wanted to say to her for years, but now she’s upstairs with Amram, the walls pressing in on her again, their soiled sheet still affixed to the bed, the stain staring back at her.

  “Come on,” Amram says, poking her in the ribs. “How about a little smile?”

  She tries to give him one.

  “Perhaps a measly congratulations?”

  “Congratulations to us,” she says gloomily. She’s happy they won, too, but whatever pride she felt has been erased by how Amram is carrying on. His semen is still spackled to her thighs; she feels a mute humiliation.

  Amram is whistling a song, but she doesn’t want to hear music coming from him; she doesn’t want to hear anything at all. He’s lying on the bed in only his T-shirt and boxers; a red spot stains his sleeve. “I proved something,” he says.

  “The only thing you proved is you could make Thisbe cry.”

  “Are you kidding me? If anyone made her cry, it was you.”

  She retrieves her pocketbook slung over the bedpost. She rifles through it, she has no idea for what.

  “Look—”

  “Could you please stop talking to me that way?” Look. Listen. Amram always starts his sentences like that. She hates how he hectors her, how he holds forth.

  “Why can’t you just be happy we won?”

  “It was only a game.”

  But if it was only a game, why can’t she let him enjoy his victory? She’s always attacking him, diminishing his small pleasures; she detests herself. She drums her fists so hard against her thighs welts start to bloom beneath her skirt.

  “You think I’m not as smart as Nathaniel, is that it?”

  “Oh, Amram.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Honestly?”

  He nods.

  “No,” she says, “I don’t think you’re as smart as Nathaniel. Not many people are. Certainly no one I know.”

  “Then why didn’t you marry him?”

  “Because I didn’t want to marry him. I wanted to marry you. There’s only one thing Nathaniel has that I want for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A job.”

  “A job?” he says. “Is that all you can ever think about? A fucking job!?”

  “I’m worried,” she says. “Don’t you understand? You have a family to support.”

  “Do you know how long it took Nathaniel to get his PhDs?”

  “If you say his name again, I’ll scream!”

  “Thirteen years total. And do you think Clarissa was hounding him during that time? Do you think she was telling him to make a living?”

  “Clarissa didn’t even know Nathaniel when he was getting his PhD. He already had it by the time she met him.”

  “Not the second one. And do you think she told him not to get it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, I do. She allowed him to pursue his dreams.”

  “Is that what I’m doing? Preventing you from pursuing your dreams?”

  “In a way, you are.”

  “We have four children,” she reminds him. “That was our dream. To raise our boys and settle in Israel. We’re living our dream, don’t you remember?”

  “Maybe I want to change careers.”

  “To what?” Ever since she’s known him, Amram has worked in computers. It’s hard for her to imagine him doing anything else.

  “What if I want to go back to school?”

  “You hated school. You cursed the very town of Oneonta.”

  “I was twenty then, and I’m almost forty now. Maybe I’d like to experiment.”

  “Doing what?” All her life has been one big experiment. Amram’s life too. Finally, she has stopped experimenting. It scares her to hear him say this.

  “I used to be good at art,” he says. “Or emergency medical training. That’s something else I’ve been thinking about.”

  She’d like to be more patient with him, she would, but something stops her. “You need to send out your résumé. That’s the first step. The next step is to get an interview.”

  “I’ve already gotten one.” Amram is standing over her now. It’s as if he’s inflating before her, like one of those balloon animals released to the sky. “I got an e-mail last night. This company wants me to come in and talk.”

  “Amram! That’s wonderful!”

  “Not when you consider what the job is.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s entry level, the kind of thing I did when I was just starting out.”

  “Entry level’s better than nothing.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t. Anyway, it’s too late. I told them I wasn’t interested.”

  “You what?”

  “Oh, don’t act so surprised, Noelle. You’d have done the same thing in my position.”

  “I most certainly wouldn’t have.”

  “If they offered me a job that was worthy of my talents, I’d consider it.”

  Worthy of your talents? she wants to say. What talents? But she’s not being fair. And if he’s not talented, what does that say about her? She married him. What talents does she have? Part-time teacher’s aide. Mother. It took her five years to graduate from high school, another five years to finish college; she got expelled from institutions up and down the East Coast. And here she is, vacillating between self-pity and self-reproach, issuing her scattershot accusations.

  “Look,” she says, pointing at the bed. The stain has gone through to the mattress. “What am I going to tell my parents?”

  “You don’t have to tell them anything. You’re thirty-seven years old.”

  “And just leave it like that?” She glances up at him, but the sight repulses her and she turns away. “It happened once before.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “A few months ago. Don’t you remember?”

  He gets up from the bed and walks across the room. He’s standing far away from her. “You humiliate me, Noelle. Every day you wake up and humiliate me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s the truest thing I’ve ever said.”

  She’s quiet.

  “I’m tired of everything.”

  “Tired of me?”

  He rushes out of the bedroom, and she follows him. Down the stairs they go and out into the garden, where it has started to rain again. They’re getting wet beside her mother’s rosebushes. “Amram, what’s happening to us?”

  He walks around the perimeter of the house and heads straight for their car.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a drive.”

  “You can’t just take off like that.”

  “Watch me.” He has the key in the ignition; he’s talking to her now through the open window.

  “Amram, please, it’s my brother’s memorial!”

  “Believe me, I won’t be missed.”

  Would you please stop feeling sorry for yourself? she wants to say, but the car has jerked forward, Amram is peeling out of the driveway. He’s just a taillight now at the foot of the road, and then not even that. Standing in front of her parents’ house, she screams, “I’m sorry, Amram, we’ll work this out! I promise we’ll do better!”

  But he’s already gone.

  When she steps back inside, her mother and sisters are seated in the living room, having witnessed what took place.

  “Well,” she says, and she lets her hands drop against her thighs; they make a little thud of resignation.

  “What was that?” her mother says.

  That, she wants to say, was my idiot husband stalking off. But she understands that to cast Amram in such light is to do the same to herself. “He just went for a spin,” she says, and since everyone knows this isn’t true, they simply sit there, not saying anything, until Dov comes in and starts to bang on the piano keys. Ari follows, saying, “Eema, if I fall from somewhere high
will you catch me?” and Noelle feels briefly rescued. But then the boys are gone and she’s alone again, and her mother says, “Come here, Noelle, sit down next to me.” Her mother places her arm around Noelle’s shoulder. “Dad left, too. All the men in the family have run off.”

  “Great,” Lily says. “We should stage a bra-burning.”

  “Amram will be back soon,” Marilyn says. “How far could he have gone?”

  But that’s the problem, Noelle thinks. He could have gone anywhere; he could be on his way back to Israel, for all she knows.

  An hour later, Amram still hasn’t returned. Noelle looks out the living room window, but she sees no sign of his car, no sign of anything besides her boys playing tetherball in the yard. David, meanwhile, has come back from the hardware store with a bucket of paint and a paint roller and two large bags of supplies. He’s in his and Marilyn’s old bedroom when Noelle knocks on the door. “Am I bothering you?”

  “You’re never bothering me, darling.”

  She steps softly inside. Her father’s on the bed with his clothes on: a pair of cargo shorts and a khaki T-shirt, his tube socks pulled up to his knees, his running shoes tightly laced. He’s holding open a book whose title she can’t make out. “Were you taking a rest?”

  “That’s okay. I can rest later. I always like company, especially yours.” His hair is disheveled, zigzagging across his scalp, as if it can’t make up its mind which way to go. His nose is red, and there’s a crumpled-up tissue on the bedside table.

  She has brought him a bowl of ice cream, which she lays now at her feet. “Are you okay, Dad?”

  “I guess.”

  Across the room sits a photo of her, and another of Clarissa on all fours, Leo perched on top of her, taken when they were just children. Her mother’s dresser is unlatched; a pink camisole peeks out of the drawer. “I’m glad you came back.”

  “Did you doubt I would?”

  She shrugs.

  “One missing husband down, another missing husband to go?”

  “So Mom told you.”

  He nods.

  A nail file sits on her mother’s nightstand. Beside it is a bottle of No-Poo. It’s shampooless shampoo, from what Noelle understands, the idea being that regular shampoo leaches out your hair’s essential nutrients, though the one time she tried No-Poo, she found that in addition to leaching out essential nutrients, regular shampoo also leached out dirt.

  “Are you worried?” her father asks.

  “I’m always worried about Amram.” But now, she admits, she’s worried even more. She can hear the piano being played downstairs. “What are you reading, Dad?”

  He holds the book up to her. “Civil War biography.”

  She didn’t know he was interested in the Civil War. Or in biographies, either, for that matter. She’s standing across the room from him, as if waiting to be invited further inside.

  “Mom’s always saying that women read fiction and men read biographies of Civil War heroes.”

  “Yet all those years you taught your students to read great literature.”

  “You’re right.” Great Expectations. The Great Gatsby. Great books with the word great in them. He should have named the course that. And not a Civil War general in the bunch. Or a president, either. Again he holds up the book for her to see. It’s about Ulysses S. Grant. “Mom got it for me for Father’s Day.”

  “Since when does Mom get you gifts for Father’s Day?”

  Since forever, he admits. When the children were small, she used to get him Father’s Day presents on their behalf and he pretended the gifts had come from them. Over time, it became a habit.

  She looks up at him, hesitates.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t get you a Father’s Day gift, Daddy. Not even a card.”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Clarissa and Lily didn’t get me anything, either. Everyone has other things on their mind.”

  And it occurs to Noelle that Father’s Day was only three weeks ago. “Wait a second, Dad. Mom got you a gift just last month?”

  “You’re saying that’s strange?”

  “Don’t you think?” She’s looking out the window, where, below her, the bird feeder sways in the porch light.

  “Whatever’s happening between Mom and me, it’s not the book’s fault.”

  She looks up at him. For an instant, she thinks she sees tears in his eyes.

  “And I’m learning something. There’s value in that.”

  “You always liked to learn things, didn’t you, Dad?”

  “I still do.”

  The closet door is open across from him, the mirrors lined up so she can see her reflection, a row of them, one after the other like a chain of dolls.

  “How about you?” he says. “Do you like to learn things?”

  “Sure,” she says. When she first came to Israel, she didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet; twelve years later, she’s fluent. And the prayer liturgy, the kosher dietary laws, the dos and don’ts of Sabbath observance: they were all foreign to her once and now she’s mastered them. Still, the details can elude her—she often relies on Amram to remind her what’s what—and though she can sit for longer than she could as a girl, she prefers to watch a movie or talk to a friend than read. The Jews, she thinks, are the People of the Book, but in this regard, at least, she’s not one of them. “Do you miss teaching?”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “Mostly I miss my students. The smart ones, at least, and the majority of them were smart. Occasionally I’d get a student who wasn’t really interested in literature, and by the end of the semester something clicked.”

  “And you ended up changing their lives?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as that. But, sure, you do your best to make a small impact.” The truth is, there are only two things he doesn’t miss about teaching. Grading is one. If he could have taught without having to grade exams, he’d have been happy to do it for half the salary. The second thing is the parents. Though that’s really the first thing. The phone calls, the angling for good grades, all that anxiety about college. It was private school and it was Manhattan, so it came with the territory. Still, if it hadn’t been for the parents, he suspects he’d still be teaching now.

  “I wouldn’t work if I didn’t have to,” Noelle says. “I don’t know a lot of people who would.”

  “What would you do instead?”

  “I’d raise my boys.”

  “And once they were raised?”

  “I’d find something.”

  “Wouldn’t you be bored?”

  “Even if I was, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Given the choice, I’d rather be bored than busy.” She looks up at the photo across the room, the one of Leo on top of Clarissa. “It’s funny, Amram’s not a teacher, but sometimes I think he was born to be one. He certainly knows how to hold forth.”

  “And that bothers you?”

  “Sometimes.” Though it can be reassuring in a way. It’s nice to be with someone who seems to know the answers, even if you resent being told what they are. “How did you end up becoming a teacher in the first place?” And she realizes, asking this, how little children know about their parents, how few questions they ask.

  “Originally I was getting my PhD, but I never quite finished.” He’d gone to Columbia for graduate school, only a few blocks from where the children were born. He’s never been able to escape that neighborhood. He completed his coursework and took his comprehensives, but when it came time to write his dissertation he got stuck. It wasn’t writer’s block, exactly; it was more like inspiration block. He had a crisis of the spirit. He saw an advertisement for a high school teaching job. It was a replacement position for the year; an English teacher had gone on maternity leave. She gave birth, presumably, but she never came back, and one year became five years became forty. He fell into what he ended up doing, which, he suspects, is what happens to most people. At this point, he can’t believe he was ever going to be a professor. He’s always saying t
hat his high school students were better, smarter, and more interesting than the students he would have taught at college. They were better, smarter, and more interesting, he often thinks, than he is himself.

  Noelle steps tentatively toward him, as if she’s waiting for him to offer her a seat, but there are no seats in the room, just the bed, with a clearing below where his feet extend. But it makes her uncomfortable, a grown woman sitting next to her father on his bed, so she simply stands across from him.

  She hears a car move past the house, the sound of it reverberating, then drifting off. “I’m sorry about last night.”

  “What about it?”

  “The food you and Mom made.”

  With a toss of his hand, he waves her off.

  “I should have been more flexible.”

  “At least we were all there. It’s what Mom wanted. To have the whole family together again.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “Under the circumstances, I don’t know.” He’s flipping through the book, and she recalls her parents, years ago, rebuking her for breaking the spines of her textbooks, for leaving them facedown on the desk and floor.

  “I brought you some ice cream,” she says. “Butter pecan. Your favorite.”

  “Darling.”

  “But it’s all melted now. You’ll have to drink it.” She looks past him, at the photo of her on her mother’s dresser. “Amram was fired,” she says. “He lost his job.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She is, too. She hears water running down the hall. Someone is getting ready to take a bath.

  “Mom and I can help if you need money.”

  She always needs money. That’s the given. But no, she tells him, she doesn’t want his help. It’s not that she’s above asking for assistance. She has received money from her grandmother, certainly. But Gretchen is at a further remove, whereas to ask money from her parents would be to admit failure, and Amram, certainly, wouldn’t countenance it. Still, she’s grateful for the offer, happy to know that if it comes down to it she won’t end up on the street.

  Her father closes his eyes. His book is lying open on the bed, and she removes a tissue from the tissue box and places it as a bookmark between the pages. Staring up at her is a picture of Ulysses S. Grant, and for an instant she’s back in high school, asked to recite the names of the presidents, but she can’t do it, her mind’s a sieve. Another humiliation revisits her, her math teacher, Ms. Rinehart, returning the exams in reverse order of the scores, and there Noelle was, sitting in the back of the classroom, her head lowered, her red hair tenting her face, as exam after exam was returned, each name lowering her score even further. How easy it is for her to remember such things. How quickly she turns on herself. “Do you want to rest?” she says. “I can turn out the lights.”