Florence Gordon (3 page)

If it were me, Emily thought, I would have just left, but I guess they’ve been friends so long that they can forgive each other for everything.

Emily wanted to find her grandmother lovable. But it wasn’t easy. Florence seemed proud of herself for vandalizing her friend’s phone, and her friend seemed to accept it. Evidently you tolerated her quirks for the privilege of knowing her. But Emily kept thinking of how excited Alexandra was about her son and granddaughter’s visit. Maybe she was using the thing to check the arrivals at the airport.

On the street, Florence declined Janine’s offer to share their cab uptown.

“You look great, both of you,” Florence said. “Emma, I can’t believe how tall you’ve gotten.”

In the cab, Emily said, “Emma.”

“She was in the ballpark,” Janine said.

Getting rid of her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter was a production. Janine kept trying to get her to share their cab, insisting that it wasn’t safe to walk home at that time of night—as if Janine knew anything about New York—but finally Florence was able to peel her off and insert them in the cab and close the door.

Emily, as usual, had been inquisitive, ironic, and distant. Florence wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anybody hold her cards as close to the vest as her granddaughter, whom she uneasily thought she might have called Emma when they said goodbye.

It was a joy to be alone. It was fun to play the social role, it was fun to play the old lion at Town Hall, but it was far, far better to be alone again. She walked uptown, twenty-five glorious blocks in the rain-washed streets, feeling like a representative of all the glamour of the city.

The strain of being with other people was sometimes close to unendurable. The strain of other people’s need. She could feel it radiating off her daughter-in-law, and she didn’t understand why. What do I have to do with
her
? Doesn’t she have Daniel; doesn’t she have her own parents; doesn’t she have her kids? What does she need me for?

No matter how hard-boiled you think you are, thought Daniel Gordon, you’re never quite prepared for New York.

Out of cop’s habit, as he walked toward Grand Central, he assessed everyone for troublemaker potential—after more than twenty years, it wasn’t even conscious anymore—and instantly he was on overload. Everyone in New York seemed like a miscreant. Even the little old ladies—most of them looked as if they were running some scam.

The bus from Kennedy takes you as far as midtown; Emily had insisted on meeting him when he got in, so they’d arranged to find each other in Grand Central. When he got there, she was already waiting, standing near the information booth in the middle of the great vaulted space. He saw her from fifty feet away, and he had the same feeling he always had when he saw her, that mix of heartlift and worry. The world is never safe enough, if you have a child.

At nineteen, she was a dark, skinny beauty—at least she was beautiful to him.

He put his two bags down and they embraced.

“Did you miss me?” she said.

“Not that much.”

His answer made her smile, because she knew it was his way of saying yes.

“It’s weird to see you in New York,” she said.

“Thanks. You too. Where’s Mom?”

“She’s got a cold. Didn’t she tell you?”

“I haven’t talked to her since Tuesday.”

Emily started telling him about Janine’s cold. He couldn’t really pay attention, because he was too happy to see her.

As they were nearing the exit, a man sprinted past them and out the door. Ten seconds later, four cops bolted by. Emily kept talking.

“You’ve become a New Yorker,” he said, but since she hadn’t even noticed the incident, she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You wanna take a cab?” he said.

“Let’s walk awhile. I can pull one.”

She reached for one of his bags but he wouldn’t let her take it.

They went out into the bright day. At a corner she took his arm and turned him gently north.

Even walking was different in New York. The afternoon streets were crowded, and people kept stepping impatiently around him. A woman his mother’s age stepped around him and gave him an irritated look as she passed.

He’d have time to get used to it all again. Taking off just one week a year, he’d been accruing vacation days for more than two decades, and he had enough to take him from Memorial Day to the end of September.

“How’s your class?”

She was taking a literature class through Barnard’s summer general-studies program.

“It starts next week. It’s gonna be great. Jane Austen. George Eliot. Virginia Woolf. What could be bad about that?”

“And what have you been eating?”

“Excuse me?”

“What have you been eating?”

“The interrogation begins.”

“I’m just asking what you’ve been eating. Is that such a difficult—”

“
Why
are you asking what I’m eating?”

“I just want to know whether you’ve been eating real food or whether you’ve been eating that birdseed you eat at home. I don’t see why that’s such a difficult—”

“All right! I admit it! I’ve been eating birdseed.”

“Seriously. Are you still being a vegan?”

“Vegan. Yes. I’m still being a vegan.”

“Why? Vegetarianism I can understand, but why do you have to take it to such an extreme?”

“You want to know the reason?”

“Yes. I do.”

“The real reason?”

“Yes.”

“I do it because I like to annoy you.”

He shook his head, supposedly in exasperation, but he was having a good time.

He had asked her to explain her veganism about a thousand times, and he didn’t really care about it—she was obviously in good health—but he liked to keep asking, because she expected him to.

She had the same light, easy walk in the middle of Manhattan that she had in Seattle. That was good, because it meant that wherever she was, she was at home. That was bad, because in New York you should be on your guard.

He worried about her safety; he worried about her happiness; he worried about her resilience. He hadn’t been pleased when she decided to take time off from college; you might even say he’d been panicky. Janine had had to talk him down.

But somehow all the worries felt like matters of the surface alone. In the deepest places, he was confident—about who she was and who she’d become.

You expect to love your children; it brings a different kind of joy to realize you admire them. Emily was a young woman of great decency. He remembered an afternoon when she was six or seven; she had a friend over and they were playing in the living room. The two of them were throwing a ball or something, and her friend said, “I’m much more bad at this than you are,” and Emily had said simply, “You’re learning.” That was Emily.

“Have you been in touch with the eternal wanderer?” he said. Her brother, Mark.

“Of course.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I don’t know. He seems groovy, as you would say.”

“What’s he up to?”

“How should I know?”

“You know. You never miss anything. Is he reading? Is he inventing things on the Internet? Is he dating? What’s he up to?”

“I don’t really know. He hasn’t changed his status. That’s all I know.”

“That’s all you’ll say. How’s Mom?”

“She hasn’t changed her status either,” Emily said.

“What’s she been up to?”

“Reading. Inventing things on the Internet. Dating.”

“I want facts, damn it. Facts.”

“I don’t have any facts. I never see her. By the time I get home at night she’s sleeping. By the time I get up in the morning she’s out for her run.”

Janine was a devoted runner and swimmer. She pursued these pastimes not in a grim effort to battle the aging process, but in a spirit of ebullience, because she had so much energy to burn off.

At home he liked to swing by the Y and pick her up from swimming. He liked to see her emerging from the water.

“Have you seen my mom?” he said.

“We’ve seen her maybe one and a half times.”

“How’d she seem?”

“Splendid. We went out to dinner with her the other day. She destroyed somebody’s BlackBerry. She called me Emma.”

“She didn’t.”

“She didn’t which?”

“She didn’t call you Emma.”

“Of course she did. Last year she called me Amelia.”

“She’s not that good with names. But she loves you.”

“She loves me in a very special way,” Emily said.

“And my dad?”

“Even less. Half a time.”

Men, men of all ages, were checking out his daughter as they passed. Daniel wanted to punch them.

The sublet was on the Upper West Side. It came with the fellowship that had brought Janine to New York. By coincidence, it was just a few blocks from the building where Daniel had grown up.

The neighborhood had changed, and hadn’t changed. It was weirding him out to be up here, but he didn’t say anything to Emily. He was not in the habit of admitting to being weirded out by anything.

The lobby had an indefinable but unmistakable smell: boiled potatoes, cleaning liquids, old, tired marble, and the sadness of elderly Jews. It was a smell he knew from all the Upper West Side apartment buildings of his youth.

The elevator was an ancient affair; as it slowly rose, he had the most peculiar sensation of being drawn back in time. It was as if he’d been his forty-seven-year-old self when he’d stepped in off the street, and now, by the fifth floor, he was a boy.

He shook that off quickly. He was wearing a sport jacket. His teenage daughter was at his side. He was a grown man.

“I wonder what you’ll think of this place,” she said.

She opened the front door to an apartment with shabby furniture, faded walls, wooden floors that hadn’t been polished for decades, and, compensating for all this, a view of the late-spring greenness of Riverside Park.

He put his bags down, and felt peaceful. He was where he belonged, not because he was back in the city of his youth, but because his wife and one of his two children were here.

“Where’s the woman?”

Emily tilted her head and he went that way.

Janine was on the couch in the living room. She was in her bathrobe, with a pile of wadded-up tissues beside her.

“You look like hell, darlin’,” Daniel said.

He said it quietly, and Emily, watching them, felt embarrassed. Though her father hardly ever put any of it into words, the intensity of his feelings was sometimes close to unbearable. The way he was looking at her mother now made Emily retreat from the room.

The next few hours were a strain. Janine felt strained, at any rate. She couldn’t be sure how anyone else felt.

She and Daniel had been married for twenty-three years. She considered their marriage to be happy; she considered their marriage to be successful—not in superficial ways but in real ways. But they’d been apart for months, and whenever they spent even a few days apart, the experience of coming together reminded her of the simple fact that he wasn’t her type.

He was so
male,
she thought, as he stalked around the kitchen, breathing on things. She and Emily had spent two months in a rapport so intuitive that they weren’t even aware of it. But now Daniel was here, smearing his maleness over everything.

She was at the kitchen table drinking tea and he was going through the cupboards. He was looking for something to eat, ostensibly, but as she watched him, she began to be possessed by the idea that even if he was hungry, the desire to eat was secondary right now, and that his primary desire, even if it was an unconscious one, was to mess up her arrangements. He looked in the refrigerator and moved things around; he looked in the cupboard and moved things around. Supposedly just looking, he put the sugar where she kept the tea and the tea where she kept the raisins and did God knows what with the raisins.

He wasn’t really messing things up, just moving things around. It was as if, in setting up the place, she’d played a white pawn, and now he was playing a black pawn, and the game was on again, the great game of marriage.

“Let’s take a walk,” she said.

They walked up Broadway. She started to feel better now that they were out and about.

“How’s everything been?” Daniel said. “How’s the girl?”

“She’s doing well. She looks good, don’t you think?”

“She looks great. What’s she been up to?”

“She’s excited to be starting that class. Women writers, from—”

“Has she talked about going back to school for real?”

“Only when I bring it up. But yes. She wants to. She’s been looking at catalogs on the computer.”

“She doesn’t want to go back to Oberlin?”

“Probably not. She says sometimes she thinks she wants someplace bigger, sometimes she wants someplace artsier. She says she likes being a student, but she prefers to approach it at a slant.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

Unhappy during the first semester of her sophomore year, Emily had decided to take the second semester off and work at the bookstore where she’d worked for the last three summers. When it abruptly went out of business in March, she’d accepted Janine’s invitation to spend a few months with her in New York.

“Have you heard from the boy? He never answers my phone calls.”

Their son had graduated from Reed a year ago and was now in Portland, living hand to mouth.

“The boy is doing just fine,” she said. “The boy is reading and writing. Or so he claims.”

“Or so he claims. What is it he’s supposedly writing?”

“I don’t know. Beat poetry. The Great American Novel.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “Without having read a word, you know exactly what it’s like. If he’s writing it.”

She nodded but didn’t smile, because she didn’t want to be disloyal to their son. She knew exactly what Daniel meant, though. If their son was writing a novel, it would be adolescently Kerouacian, a series of stream-of-consciousness whooshings about drugs and sex and travel, and it would be close to unreadable.

“But maybe he
will
write the Great American Novel someday,” she said. “Maybe whatever he’s writing now—”