The Point of Vanishing (11 page)

The dance music changed to a Donna Summer remix, and I felt an odd little surge of confidence. Not in America, it was easy to feel patriotic, to muster a healthy American disdain for Germans dancing to disco. Besides, I'd always loved parties in college—the dancing, the alcohol, the feeling of something hidden moving below the floor, something rising and starting to emerge. Juan Ignacio joined a group of friends and I didn't follow. The faces and bodies felt too close, and I wanted the wall behind me to recede, so there'd be more space between me and the dancers. I could see the woman in the white blouse so clearly. The play of her hips beneath her long skirt, the expression on her face. I tried to look away, but I was pretty sure she wanted to say something to me. The two men kept dancing beside her. Her mouth, which was strong, her teeth slightly too large, gave the impression that she was about to speak. She recognized me, I was almost sure, and she was on the verge of mouthing something—to ask where we'd met, or if I wanted to dance.

The song changed again. There was no way I wouldn't have remembered her. My mind tore through my past—through bus stations and piazzas and museums, through lecture halls and airports and summer camp, even through New York City, where I'd once tried to memorize the faces of girls at Grand Central,
wondering who they were, where they came from, suddenly dizzyingly aware of the number of girls I would glimpse once and probably never see again, suddenly dizzyingly aware, beneath that enormous ceiling adorned with the constellations, of the role chance could play in a life. But the dancing woman was nowhere. Not rising out of any summer stream, not stepping onto any train, not walking beside me down any street.

As I looked at her again, a sudden longing overwhelmed me. I wanted my past to be different—for my life to be different, so that it might have included her.

“Are you Italian?”

The song had ended, I'd gone to the window for air, and she was standing beside me. I had the momentary feeling that I'd willed her there. “American.”

Something in her eyes stalled.

“Is it so bad?”

“
Naya
,” she said. “My name is Milena.”

“Naya?”

“Naya. It means no and yes. But at the same time.” She smiled lightly, a smile at herself. “This is very Viennese.”

The man with the long blond hair was clearly watching us. “Would you like to get a drink?”

“We go to the roof.”

I followed her to the kitchen for more wine, fearing a series of delays and introductions, but she moved purposefully through the crowd. The stairwell rose one more floor, the air immediately looser, the music blurring behind us. We passed through a door that said only
attenzione.

A crescent moon hung in the sky. I'd expected the roof to be a kind of party satellite, but maybe the others didn't know about it. We were alone. The March air bit with a pleasant sharpness. We could see the terra-cotta rooftops, the Due Torri lit from below, and Piazza Maggiore glowing like the courtyard of a medieval
palace. She rested her wine on the parapet.

“Would you say the moon tonight is naya?” You could see the crescent, but you could also see the part of it that was dark. Apparently, the guard who checked the normalcy papers of my comments had nodded off in his booth.

She tilted her head to the side, dim light catching her neck. “But naya does not usually mean this.” She almost smiled. “So you are the American writer, no?”

I did my best to sound modest and impressive.

“Do you know Musil?” she said.

“No.”

“Goethe?”

“Not personally.”

She made a face. I was becoming more American by the second. “Herman Hesse?” she said, clearly throwing me a bone.

“Hesse! I read
Siddhartha
when I was sixteen. At this real estate office where my father found me a job. I read and forgot to answer the phone.”

“Exactly. You know
Narcissus and Goldmund
 ”

I wasn't about to lose the little ground I'd gained. “Tell me about it.”

“Now, this is very teenager experience, but when I am fourteen, I read this book. It is the story of two young men who meet in a monastery school. One is quiet and studies hard and reads Greek and Latin and so. The other is beautiful and likes to adventure and to live. I read it in summer, at my grandmother's house in the Steiermark. For days I do not go with the others to swim in the lake. I do not go to the meals. I sit in the garden and read and wonder which character I am more similar to. But I want to be both. Is this not strange? Even then I know the book is obvious. It is supposed to be obvious. You are supposed to find a compromise between them—to live part adventure, part study. But it is not obvious to me. I want to be both of them, completely.
I sit in the garden with my too-big sunhat, and I want to go everywhere and to read everything. But when my friend Sophie asks me to walk in the mountains or to swim, I don't want to go. Nothing is fast enough. Nothing outside is big enough for what I feel inside. You must know this feeling, no?”

I was stunned. The chill night air had slipped inside my shirt, but I tried to hide it. I had the sense this woman knew more about me than I knew about myself. “I guess it's a feeling of not knowing where to start.”

She squeezed my arm. “Ya, exactly,” she said. Her touch rattled through my body.

The music from the party downstairs had drifted far away. We went on talking. It was as though there was no possibility of misunderstanding, because the words meant so little, were just approximate shapes for what we felt, and what we felt had somehow arrived before us—more like a frequency we were hearing, or a certain hue that was part of the air.

The conversation lasted maybe seven minutes. When we were both starting to shiver, we went back downstairs, but I didn't return to the party. I didn't want to lose the feeling. She needed to return to her friends, and I didn't want to chance feeling jealous or out of place. I continued downstairs to my room, took a long hot shower, then lay on top of the blanket. The music was still throbbing above me, drifting down into the courtyard. I remembered the way she had looked at me while she was dancing, like she recognized me. She hadn't been mistaking me for someone else.

I was nervous to be bringing them to the house. Linda had said they needed a Christmas tree. They didn't have a car, they couldn't afford a delivery—they possibly were trying to hire a ride up to Newport. But I knew they couldn't afford it. The café was just as bereft of customers the second time I went. Bella's sweatshirt had the same penguins pulling the same polar bear on the same sled; Linda's gray sweater was still unmended. Linda had sounded defeated, ready to concede, a Christmas tree a convention she and her unconventional daughter could do without. They had a parakeet, Mr. Kipling, and Mr. Kipling and a few bags of microwave popcorn were all the cheer they needed. It wasn't so much her loneliness as her resignation to her loneliness that got me. Maybe it struck a chord with some fear I had about myself—some future I didn't want to admit as a possibility. Anyway, I may have been a Jew and a hermit, but I wasn't the Grinch, was I? Pine saplings dotted the top of the incline where I left my car; an axe and a rusted hacksaw waited in the mud-room. And these two displaced British women weren't expecting anything, which made it possible to offer. It would just be a tiny Christmas miracle, with no expectation of anything to follow. The whole expedition—picking them up, felling the tree, driving them home—would cost me nothing. At least that's what I'd told myself.

It was a bright, windy late afternoon, and they were waiting outside the café, playing some kind of hand-clapping game in the cold. Linda wore a thin scarf tied roguishly around her
neck—part high fashion, part Huckleberry Finn. Bella, in her enormous Michelin Man coat, looked ready for Siberia. They were giddy. From their faces, you might have thought suitcases were waiting at their feet and we were setting out to drive cross-country, wild adventures ahead.

“You're sure. You're absolutely sure,” Linda said, the car door open, the cold whipping in.

“Yes.”

“There must be quite a lot of trees, of course.”

“Mother, just get in.”

Bella was already in the backseat. Linda closed her door, smiled at me—gratitude flavored with conspiracy. I wondered how long they'd been out in the cold.

“Nice car. Does your radio work?” Bella said.

“Bella!” Linda said.

I flipped it on—there was static, the sound of the empty street, of long skies and coming snow. No one was out in town, everyone probably already inside with their families, baking cakes, wrapping presents, touching up the ornaments on their trees. The truth was, I didn't really know what most people did on Christmas, only that it was usually nice to be with my own family not doing whatever those things were. We didn't have any Jewish Christmas rituals—no Chinese food, no going to the movies. We were more or less left out of America for the day, but we were left out together.

Only two stations surfaced through the static in English, and we drove through the pre-holiday quiet to commercials for snowmobiles and truck dealerships. I feared “White Christmas” coming on—this non-Grinch thing could only go so far—but as we turned onto Roaring Brook Road, a familiar chord hit.

DOES he love me
,
I want to know
,
HOW can I TELL if he LOVES me so?

Bella launched into full lip sync in the backseat, shaking her
long blonde hair back and forth, and Linda executed a half turn, first just to smile, then big-eyeing it with her. As we passed the abandoned county fairground—the hand-painted sign for Aug. 23 still posted above the snow—I couldn't help feeling it too: the easy champagne of the music, the lift of being in the car and going somewhere, of not being alone, of having a kind of mission. We were going to chop down a tree. We were a
group
now, my little Honda a quietly rollicking Merry Band of Misfits.

“How far is your house?”

“About ten more miles.”

“Very well,” Linda said, adjusting her scarf. I wasn't sure if she wanted the trip to be longer or shorter.

As we turned onto the dirt road, crossed the snow mud-stained with tractor tracks, and continued up into the woods, the intoxication subsided. The station was going scratchy. I switched the radio off. We followed past the trailers, into the thicker snow of the unmaintained lane, and the silence of the trees surrounded us. I had the feeling that I was taking them inside my mind. I pictured them as though inside a crystal ball, caped wayfarers exploring some unmapped region, the forking paths into the woods really just various substructures of my consciousness. The thought was horrifying—far too interior. I didn't want anyone that close.

Linda pulled at her cuticles. Bella hummed to herself. I was a man they didn't know, taking them to a cabin in the woods. A cabin with an axe and a hacksaw. It occurred to me I should say something. The silence in the car was a silence for one, uncomfortable with three, and I knew I should be putting them at ease. But I couldn't play tour guide. I couldn't translate. To talk about the land would have felt like I was talking about myself. Just having them with me, where I had only been alone, was already a kind of conversation, an intimacy I didn't know how to understand.

“It's so far away,” Bella said. The snowy road rolled silently beneath us.

“Patience,” Linda said.

We passed the open field, pushed through the drifts, and I parked in the small plowed-out space, the lone human accommodation, at the top of the grade. As we got out of the car, I didn't say anything. I wanted the place to speak for itself, like an abandoned cathedral, its hush still in the air. When I returned from town, my only customary routine was to piss in the snow—less to mark the territory than to feel myself back in the woods, back in the wild. I didn't suggest it now. But I was conscious of moving more slowly than I had in town, of feeling oddly proud of the apple trees outlined and shimmering with snow, of the majestic display of the pines.

They followed me down towards the house. A skein of smoke was still rising from the chimney.

“It's quite big, isn't it?” Linda said. Snow glinted off the sloping roof of the garage. A jagged palisade of icicles hung from the beaten deck outside my room.

“It looks enchanted,” Bella said.

The rustling of our jackets and our boots squeaking against the snow were oddly loud, like we were an invading battalion. I didn't want to make them wait in the cold, but I didn't want them inside the house.

“I'll just need to get the axe and saw.”

We passed through the store of firewood, the muted light, the cold cottony smell of the wood. They made no sign of dropping behind. They expected to come in. To leave them in the garage would have been cruel.

“We'll just go into the mudroom,” I said.

But as we stepped inside, the soiled musk of dead mouse unmistakable in the walls, the telephone began to ring. It hadn't rung in weeks. “Excuse me,” I said, trying to sound routine. I
opened the door to the house, tracked snow past the woodstove, picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“You were out walking?”

The voice sounded parched and small. “Yes. How are you, Lev?”

“And you have shoveled the roof? And cleaned the chimney?”

“Yes,” I said, answering the first question, not the second. “How are you?”

“Not so great. I make this brief—the long-distance rates, you don't believe.” I could see him running his hand through his thinning red hair, the wind hot on the windowpane of some unkempt apartment.

“What is it?”

“Grossman left. He is also in the department. Was. Was in the department. So we have few options for next year. I must stay in Tel Aviv. It is not so bad here. But the house. I dream last night of coming back to animals. You know this Bear Jamboree?”

I had to think. “At Disney World?”

“Yes, it is horribly fake. Horribly American, if you excuse me. But I dream of coming back and there is the bear jamboree. Inside my house. The bears playing instruments. You can stay? Same agreement. No rent. Only wood and electricity. This is acceptable?”

Bella and Linda were bickering in the mudroom like they were back in the kitchen at the café. I carried the phone away from the woodstove, closer to the window. “I'll have to think about it, Lev.”

“The department meeting is soon. They need an answer.”

I tried to imagine another winter. Outside, a fringe of birch bark tattered in the wind. The trees were so still. All I could see was quiet. But it came more easily than imagining the alternative.
The loneliness would be bad, but anything else would be worse. Back in Boston, I couldn't see myself, couldn't see anything. The curtain of my mind wouldn't open.

“I'll think about it.”

“Good! Very good! Excellent! I go now. We talk in another week. Good-bye!”

Out the long windows to the woods, the land around the house felt vast, suddenly expanded. I could hear Bella and Linda in the mudroom, but their voices had gone farther away. This was becoming my life. The stillness of the days. The long quiet of the nights. The fire in the woodstove. This was becoming who I was. And the only thing that disturbed me was how natural it felt: the voice that should have been raging against staying—
What are you thinking? Remember the boy in the bus!
—had drifted farther away, too.

I returned to the mudroom, gathered the axe and the hacksaw, and we headed outside into the cold. I was relieved to have Bella and Linda with me, relieved to see the eagerness, however sobered, still in their faces. Maybe I could learn to bring them into my life here—maybe I could move one step in from the periphery of the periphery. Maybe I'd even cook them dinner one night. I had a fleeting image of myself running a Christmas tree farm—an article in the
Newport Chronicle
about the young Jew who sells trees.

“Look, can you imagine?” Bella said, pointing towards the tallest spruce. “You'd need scaffolding!”

“And a house without a roof,” Linda said.

I could feel the weight of the axe on my shoulder. It was heavier than I'd expected. The hacksaw was badly rusted, orange corroding the sharp teeth, but the axe might do the trick. “You said a sapling, right?”

“Of course. Nothing much taller than Bella.”

“Do you think it will still smell like the woods?” Bella said.

Linda looked at me hopefully.

“It should,” I said, unsure if I was playing expert or father, but not too keen on either role.

They chose a pine sapling not far from the apple trees. It wasn't very robust, some threadbare gaps towards the top, but it would do. The axe was terribly dull. I got through the bark, the pulp white as an exposed shin, but my hands were turning raw.

“Can I have a go?” Bella asked. “Just a swing or two?”

I looked at Linda. Her face was open—she was far too ready to defer to my judgment. This short trip, this standing around in the cold, was probably the closest she'd come to a vacation in months. Her trust made me uneasy, but I handed Bella the axe.

She swung, missed, swung again. The thin top branches shivered with the blow. She'd probably never taken a gym class, never played a sport, and her body was wild with untrained energy. Her cheeks flushed red, her hair whipped around her face. The axe kept corkscrewing her around, until it looked like she might hit her own leg.

Feeling disturbingly paternal, I told them the axe was too dull, which it likely was, and took up the hacksaw and cut through the slender trunk. We drove back to town with the windows open, taking the turns very slowly, each of us with one arm on a branch, the tree shifting side to side on the roof. Linda directed me. They lived about a quarter-mile behind the café, on a street with very modest houses, narrow driveways between them. A few wreaths on the doors, no Christmas light displays, no plastic reindeer out front.

“This has been very kind of you,” Linda said, her hands already in the tree's branches. “You must need to get going.”

“It's no problem.”

“We can manage,” she said glancing behind her towards the house. “Thank you very much.”

“Mom, let him help,” Bella said.

Linda wouldn't look at me.

“Let me help.”

“Oh, very well then, but keep your eyes closed. I haven't tidied. Really, you must understand.”

We small-stepped our way inside with the tree, and though I was trying not to look at anything, the smell hit me hard. The tiny kitchen reeked of cat litter and what I could only guess was Mr. Kipling. The house was as cold as the café. Newspapers littered almost every surface. It was worse than I'd imagined. Linda began bustling about, clearing a space, searching for the box of lights, apologizing. Mr. Kipling began to whistle and chirrup from his cage like a video game on the fritz.

“Thank you, thank you so much for your help,” Linda said. “Could I offer you a drink of some kind?”

She was as uncomfortable as I would have been with them in my kitchen. A thin gray cat was pawing at a green string of lights.

“I really should get going. It was a lot of fun.”

She shook my hand, smiled in pained way, raised her hand to her hair. “It was, wasn't it?”

Bella followed me outside onto the front step, holding the screen door open. Her face had gone quiet. This was her house behind her, and she suddenly looked very shy. The bird let out a tremendous whistle from the kitchen.

“Mum does the best she can.”

“I know she does.”

I could feel the empty house waiting in the woods, the fire burnt down, the long months ahead. I needed to turn and leave, but my feet felt heavy.

“Do you think you'll go to college next year?”

“Depends on Mum. On the café. But I hope so. All those zygotes have to go somewhere, right?”

“Sure do.”

“And not just in my thoughts.”

A light breeze lifted at her hair. I had a sudden urge to escape with her, to drive north and to keep on driving. I pictured a roadside motel, a diner. We could join up with a circus; we could find work. She was so young, I could basically invent her, and invent myself in her eyes—we could probably stretch it until summer before it collapsed. Then there would be the conversations, the letters. The time to show my compassion.