He must be a better husband and father. As he emerges from her building into an evening sun shower, her scent lingering faintly, he decides this. It’s clear that the affair will go on, he’s too weak to end it and doesn’t want to, it makes him happy, it calms him: but it also creates a debt, and he must pay it. He won’t leave his wife. What eases and delights him, he sees clearly, is not the affair but the balance, the harmonics of family and lover struck together, routine redeemed by voluptuous escape. There’s a careers fair approaching at Hannah’s school, and he volunteers, with Hannah’s blessing, to speak about business and banking and markets in terms that 13-yearolds can understand. He shows up, makes jokes, stokes dreams. Afterwards he takes Hannah out for lunch. Are there a lot of girl investment bankers, she asks him over teriyaki chicken. Some, he says. I think I want to do that, she says. I want to be like you, if I can get better at math. He laughs. You don’t need much math to do what I do. Then what do you need? I don’t know, he says. Luck. Instincts. Appetite.
Most evenings, when he arrives home from Rebecca’s apartment at dusk, he takes his wife and daughter for dinner, listens with pleasure to their laughter, stories of their day. And later at night, most nights, silence reigning in the wide halls of their immaculate, under-furnished house in Forest Hill, he slips into Cynthia’s room and they make love. One night, as they finish, he sees she’s crying. His stomach drops; somehow she’s found out. What is it, he asks. I didn’t get a chance to know you when you were young, she says. When you were twenty. Somebody else got that. Another woman. And tonight I thought: this is what he was like. He finds himself moved also. Shattered, for a moment. But he covers it up, catches his breath, swallows hard. So I was doing it like a boy? I was fumbling? No. And you know it. I’m still in love with you, she says. Oh. Was that in question? I didn’t ask the question, I’m very good at not asking those questions, but tonight I did and the answer is I’m still in love with you. Good. Good, I’m glad. And you, she asks. Are you still in love with me, Jake? It was never a question for me, he says.
It’s humid and grey early summer when the call about the suicide attempt wakes him in the night. Thought you’d like to know, says Paulson, thought you wouldn’t want to be the last to know. She’s at Mount Sinai, she’s been admitted. He flies out of the house, his shoes half on. Driving down empty side streets, he has the distinct sensation of falling. She’s unconscious when he gets there, nobody at her bedside. He asks a nurse what happened. Are you family? Close friend. Pills, says the nurse. She’ll be fine. In the short term at least. Are you staying with her? She’s been alone all night. He sits by her for hours, watches her chest rise and fall. Every few minutes he has to fight the urge to lean over the bed and shake her, hard. She wakes around seven, doesn’t react to the sight of him. Maybe she doesn’t recognize me, he thinks. Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill herself, maybe she was trying to scrub her memory clean, maybe it’s worked. You’re going to be late to the office, she says. He’s silent. Her eyes fixed on the ceiling, she shakes her head. I’m a lark. An itch. It means nothing. You’ll never leave your wife. We’re killing time. I won’t love again. I’ve tried, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and I can’t. It isn’t in me, it’s dead, I can’t. And I don’t want to pretend anymore.
The affair barrels downhill from there. They fight terribly the day after she returns home. A vase smashed, chairs overturned. Minutes after he leaves her apartment, he can no longer remember what the fight was about. He swears to forget her, promises himself it’s over this time for good. Late evening now and the streets are still crowded, streams of strangers milling towards subway entrances, men and women in suits leaving work, and young people, so many kids, holding hands and stealing kisses. What are they doing here, so deep downtown, in the smog of trade? He slows, watches them, tries to remember what he wanted at that age; tries to remember what he wanted yesterday. He’s tempted to descend into the subway tunnels with them, to retreat underground, anonymous, and disappear.
But he must get rice. Cynthia’s asked him to pick some up. She’s cooking tonight, stir-fry chicken. A meal he likes. Too much drama, he thinks, not good. Bad blood pressure in the family. He retrieves his car from beneath his office tower, heads north, home. Dusk is settling already and traffic’s light.
A week later he hears from his brother for the first time in ten years. He’s on his back porch on a muggy Sunday afternoon when Cynthia hands him the phone, and from the look on her face he guesses it’s Ezra even before the first word rasps over the line from Vancouver. Jake, Jake. Been way too long. Good to hear your voice, man. His brother makes small talk: I heard about the crazy weather out there, like a sauna, hot here too this year but you know Vancouver, not so suffocating, can’t stand that. Ezra asks about Cynthia and Hannah, about work: Still trading stocks for millionaires, huh, got any hot tips for me? He answers perfunctorily — his girls are fine, no hot tips, everything’s fine. The porch door slides open behind him and Hannah emerges, a slim volume of poetry tucked under her arm. She crosses the backyard into the shade of the apple tree and sits, absorbed at once. He realizes he’s been silent on the line and so has Ezra. So, says Ezra. He waits. So, I … I’m not just calling to shoot the shit, I know you probably don’t … He waits. You’re not in touch with dad, huh. No, he says, not lately. He’s … fuck, Jake, I’m out on a limb here, I don’t know what to do with this, I love you. Okay? I love you. What’s going on, he says. The phone’s damp now with sweat, the heat unbearable. He’s got maybe a few days, man. Asshole, you know? To go and get like this. Mom called me, you know Mom, said she refused to call you if I wouldn’t, she was doing her old thing, trying to get you and me … anyway, the point is he’s got maybe a few days and … well, as you can imagine … Silence. Finally, quiet but resolved: I’m not going to see him. Thought about it. But the answer is no. Gotta be that way. And maybe one of us should go. So. I know it’s pressure and everybody’d understand if you couldn’t come out, you’re all the way across the fucking continent, it’s an interruption, I know that, but anyway, there it is. Up to you. Take care of yourself. I love you, man.
The sun is shining, birds are singing, his daughter is reading beneath the shade of the apple tree, and on his back and neck the sweat is rapidly chilling. He shivers and goes into the house. Upstairs in his bedroom, he shuts the door and swears till he wears himself out. Unsteady, a tightness in his chest, he yanks a suitcase from the closet, unzips it and throws it open on the floor, flings clothing in. He must be loud, because Cynthia appears in the doorway. She asks him what’s happened, where he’s going. Vancouver, he says. He packs. Don’t let him, she says. Don’t let him what. Whatever he’s doing this time. Whatever he’s asking you for. Don’t give in. He keeps packing. He knows he’s not being fair to her — she wants only to help, to understand. But he’s unable to offer any coherent account of what he feels right now. I have a fundraising meeting at the synagogue tonight, please get dinner for Hannah before you go, she says as she leaves the room, her voice edged with exasperation. He keeps packing.
On the flight west he imagines what he’ll say to his father and what his father will say to him. It’ll be difficult, he thinks as he gazes at the ridged seafloor of clouds. They’ve always had trouble communicating. His father was once a king of the garment industry, in charge of three factories and an army of salesmen that he’d inherited from his own father, who’d built the business nearly from scratch, so the family mythology goes, after escaping pogroms in Poland with pocket change and forged papers. And his father directed the interests of this dynasty for many years, shortly before and after the death of his own father, and the family was prosperous, and Jake idolized his father, not only because the family was prosperous but also because his father seemed, even to a boy of twelve, a complete person, the image of balance and grace, kind and loving to his family, wise about matters both high and low. When accusations surfaced of his father’s embezzlement of funds, he felt no scorn, f
elt only that a time of great difficulty approached and they should prepare themselves for it. He was right. His father lost everything. And one morning he woke up and was an adolescent and his father seemed to him a humiliated man, and this wasn’t just the typical disenchantment of adolescence but also true. His father retreated into drink and self-pity; at thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, he saw this and didn’t know how to feel, swung from hatred to wrenching sympathy. They drifted together and apart with the seasons while he still lived at his parents’ house, he never arrived at the settled hostility towards his father that Ezra, still a child then, soon developed, but they never spoke as easily as they’d done before, especially not after he adopted his mother’s Anglo-Saxon maiden name, White — a name, to his mind, innocent of history, free of remembered mythology or tradition, a name he could inscribe as he wished — as the standard he bore into the world.
He lands in Vancouver late at night and takes a cab to the hospital. The nurse on duty tells him his father is asleep, hasn’t stirred much all day. His father’s condition is precarious but, for the moment, stable. He glances into the room and turns away. I’ll come back in the morning. He leaves his hotel details at the nurse’s station, requests that he be contacted immediately if anything changes.
From his hotel room, he calls Ezra to tell him that he’s come. He makes a token suggestion to meet at the hospital the next morning, which Ezra ignores. They settle on breakfast at the hotel restaurant. When they hang up he undresses, goes to the window, peers out. It’s dark now and all he can see are lights in the harbour and on the North Shore. In the morning the mountains will greet him. If even a little he believes in God, mountains have something to do with it. On previous trips to Vancouver, he’s had the thought more than once that they’re appointed here as guardians of his father and brother, that they perform the sacred filial, fraternal duty that he’s impiously shirked. Yet the sleep he falls into is warm and fathomless.
In the morning, in the lobby, he spots Ezra right away, at a window table in the hotel restaurant, coffee mug and newspaper in front of him. He’s aged. And groomed to deny it: long hair, scruff, T-shirt and jeans. Self-conscious about his pressed shirt and pants, he goes into the restaurant and greets his brother. Ezra stumbles to his feet, grins, extends his hand. Good to see your face, hasn’t changed a bit. Yours neither. Ezra asks again about Cynthia and Hannah, his house, his job. Still the happiest man alive, aren’t you? Things are fine, he says. He’s about to ask after Ezra’s wife, but Ezra pre-empts him: Yeah, Sheila and I fucked it up years ago, after my troubles, she stayed with me for a while but when my luck ran out and the cash was gone and I couldn’t provide for her lifestyle, well. I’m sorry, he says, I didn’t know. No no, of course, it was all happening a long ways away from you. Ezra flags the waiter and orders a glass of rye. A bit early, I know, he says, but a little before lunchtime calms my nerves, I don’t make a habit of it, I’m under a lot of pressure, and it’s a, how would you say, a special occasion. His drink arrives. Cheers. Can I persuade you to come to the hospital with me? Ezra sets the glass down. He frowns, his eyes wander. Nah, he says. Not interested. Wish it were different, but the thing is, I know it won’t make anyone happy, not me, not him, you know? All it’ll do is make me feel like shit, and he’ll be no better off, either. No better off, he thinks, in a final sense, maybe, but he knows their father would be struck by how uncannily Ezra has grown into the old man’s echo. Macho, fragile. Pretentious about lack of pretention, wielding lack of affectation affectedly, like a challenge. And hot-blooded: quick to anger, quick to love, betrayal intolerably keen. Sorry. Wish I felt otherwise. In other news, says Ezra, I’ve got a business prospect that could be real interesting, we should talk, we always said we’d get into something together. And Ezra outlines the details of a new industrial development along the oceanfront in Richmond. Investment possibilities. Let’s talk more about it later, he says, and changes the subject. He eats quickly. As soon as he can, he says he has to get going, he’s meeting a client in West Vancouver before he returns to the hospital. It isn’t true, and he lies badly, too emphatically, but the pull his brother has always had on his life’s orbit is insidious. Good to see your face, Ezra says. Let’s meet up again before you head home. Talk business.
He walks across town to the beach, watches boats drift into the bay. From here his life back home looks strange and small. His time with Rebecca Weiss feels from this distance like a pebble dropped into the centre of the ocean, a brief ripple testifying to the impact, then nothing. The objects of his life back east seem featureless. He can remember his house’s size and colour, say, but details elude him: how close together the hedges are, the shape of the doorknobs, what’s tacked to the fridge. His wife’s face, the face of his child — of course he never forgets them. But from this distance their edges are blurred. At moments like these, anonymous in the ocean breeze, he remembers that he existed before those others existed in his life.
It’s nearly evening when he works up the nerve to cross the threshold of his father’s hospital room. He sits bedside for an hour before his father wakes, senses his presence, turns to face him. They haven’t seen each other in a year, since his father last flew east to visit his granddaughter, stayed at their house for a week during the summer and complained about draughty windows. Looks about the same now. Faded. You must be jetlagged, the old man says, his voice all catch and rasp. His father’s concentration isn’t good, and he seems to be hallucinating, refers a few times to “the bunch of you,” others in the room. The old man asks after Hannah, Cynthia. They’re fine, he says. He mentions Hannah’s excellent marks, the high school where she’ll start in the fall. His father drifts out of consciousness again.
The night wears on. He wanders out to the nurses’ station and talks to a nurse about his father’s condition, returns to the room, reads yesterday’s paper. He’s standing by the window at around two in the morning when the old man opens his eyes and speaks in a tremulous voice he almost doesn’t recognize. No, not me, I was too good for that, I never went to shul, I never went to church with your mother, oh no, I thought it was bullshit, I paraded that around the house, hypocrisy, let the fools pray, what do I need with cheap consolation. As if I knew anything. Maybe it would’ve helped. Tell your mother I regret everything. Tell your brother I forgive him and God help him.
His father dies in his sleep a few hours later. He calls Cynthia, who offers condolences and to get on a plane with Hannah; he asks them to stay put. Easier that way. The cemetery isn’t far from the beach and the scent of the ocean permeates the proceedings, he’s aware of it acutely, it distracts him. Ezra isn’t there. He consoles his mother. She and his father divorced twenty years ago, she’d been involved with Lionel for many years more than that, the affair open and acknowledged, Lionel the real paternal force in the house after his father’s fall. But it’s clear that she’s shaken. Lionel’s dead, and she’s drifted from her children. She must feel terribly alone, he knows, and the thought of it saddens him, but the truth is that she’s become a stranger to him. His feeling towards her is respectful and obliging yet also disturbingly cool. He accompanies her to her hotel after the funeral and proposes they have dinner together so she won’t be by herself. She says she’ll call to let him know. He knows she won’t.
He returns to his own hotel room and repacks his suitcase, restores items to his toiletry kit. When he’s finished, he calls Ezra and tells him that their father is buried. Ezra is silent on the line, and then he weeps and weeps and tries to talk and can’t and so keeps weeping. He listens to his brother cry, breathes into the line to let him know he’s there. I’m leaving tonight, he says. Thank you for letting me know he was almost out of time. I’m glad I came. I’m glad I saw you. There’s a long silence. He notices his brother’s breathing has changed, acquired a sharpness. Like the last time. He has a presentiment of what’s coming and he’s right. You fucker, says Ezra. You bloodless trash. Why don’t you fuck off and die. Not hesitating but not an
gry, he hangs up. He falls back on the bed, sets the alarm for a few hours later, early evening, and sinks into sleep.
Later he’ll wonder what might have happened if instead he’d checked out early. If he hadn’t been there to receive the call from reception, to hear Paulson whisper the news. He’ll wonder if, had he called Cynthia with his plane’s arrival time in Toronto, he might’ve been on the other line when Paulson tried to reach him. Later there will be days when he wishes this is what had happened. He’ll imagine his wife’s face grown older, folds of skin on her neck slackened with age. He’ll struggle to remember the way his house looked when he approached it at dusk in the evenings, on his way home from work or Rebecca, and how far apart the hedges were, and the shape of the doorknobs, and the shine of Cynthia’s auburn hair in sunlight, in the kitchen. All this could still have been mine, he’ll think. I have given up my inheritance to venture forth into the wilderness and I do not know what fortune awaits me there, perhaps only death awaits me. Nevertheless I have packed my bag with those few things I require and I will not ask for anything while I live though I may want so help me God. Was this his cast of mind in those first moments? Later he won’t be able to recall. And he’ll worry that his actions then were not a poem but merely animal. Instinct, survival.
Faithful and Other Stories Page 8
