Sourland (34 page)

“Yes, maybe.” Her lips moved, in answer to a question. But what was the question?

She stopped the car on the Thruway shoulder, impulsively. Woody's card—what had she done with Woody's card? Anxiously she checked the manila envelope containing the death certificate—yes, it was there.

T
he party was in
full swing
—like a cruise ship that has left the dock and is plying its way through choppy waves out of the harbor—glittering with lights and giddy with voices, laughter, music. The party was her party—hers and her husband's—in fact, today was her husband's birthday—at the farther end of the living room Harris was in a fever-pitch of conversation surrounded by his oldest friends who'd been post-docs with him at MIT in Noam Chomsky's lab, 1963–64—he wouldn't detect her absence she was sure.

Seven-fifty
P.M
.—near-dusk—a strategic moment for the hostess to slip away between the swell of arrivals, greetings, cocktails and appetizers and the (large, informal) buffet supper that would scatter guests through the downstairs rooms of the sprawling old Tudor house at 49 Foxcroft Circle, University Heights.

How many years the Zalks had hosted this party, or its variants! Leah Zalk took a childlike pleasure seeing her house through the eyes of others—how the rented tables were covered in dusky-pink tablecloths—not the usual utilitarian white—how the forsythia sprigs she'd cut the previous day from shrubs alongside the house were blossoming dazzling-yellow in tall vases against the walls—how beautiful, flickering candlelight in all the rooms—track lighting illuminating a wall of Harris's remarkable photographs taken on his travels into the wilder parts of the earth—in a farther corner of the living room a guest who was clearly a trained pianist was playing cheery show-tunes, dance tunes of another era—“Begin the Beguine”—“Heart and Soul”—alternating with flamboyant passages of Liszt—the rapid nervous rippling notes of the
Transcendental Etudes
that Leah had once tried to play as a girl pianist long ago.

A party in
full swing
. What a relief, to escape.

Between her eyes was a steely-cold throb of pain. Quickly it came and went like flashing neon she had no wish to acknowledge.

Leah made her way through the crowded dining room and into the kitchen where the caterer's assistants were working—made her way through the back hall to the rear of the house—pushed open a door that opened onto a rarely used back porch—and was astonished—disconcerted—to see someone leaning against the railing, smoking—a guest?—a friend?—this individual would have to be an old friend of the Zalks, who'd had the nerve to make his way into the rear of the house to the back porch—yet Leah didn't recognize him when he turned with a startled smile, cigarette smoke lifting from his mouth like a curving tusk.

“Mrs. Zalk? Hey—h'lo.”

The young man's greeting was bright, ebullient, slightly over-loud.

Leah smiled a bright-hostess smile: “Hello! Do I know you?”

He was no one she knew—no one she recognized—in his mid- or late twenties—somewhat heavy, fattish-faced—yet boyish—looming above her at six foot three or four—with bleached-looking pale blond
hair curling over his shirt collar—moist and slightly protuberant pale-blue eyes behind stylish wire-rimmed glasses—an edgy air of familiarity or intimacy. Was Leah supposed to know this young man? Clearly he knew
her
.

He bore little resemblance to Harris's graduate and post-doc students and could hardly have been one of Harris's colleagues at the Institute—he had a foppish air of entitlement and clearly thought well of himself. He wore an expensive-looking camel's hair sport jacket and a black silk shirt with a pleated front—open at the throat, with no necktie—his trousers were dark, sharp-pressed—his shoes were black Italian loafers. In his left earlobe a gold stud glittered and on his left wrist—a thick-boned wrist, covered in coarse hairs—a white gold stretch-band watch gleamed. A cavalier slouch of his broad shoulders made him look as if, beneath the sport jacket that fitted him tightly, small wings were folded against his upper back.

A coarse sort of angel, Leah thought, with stubby nicotine-stained fingers and a smile just this side of insolent.

“Certainly you know me, Mrs. Zalk—‘Leah.' Though it's been a while.”

How embarrassing! Leah had no doubt that she knew, or should have known, the young blond man. As she'd pushed out blindly onto the porch she'd been rubbing the bridge of her nose where the alarming pain had sprung—she wouldn't have wanted anyone to see her with anything other than a hostess's calmly smiling face—if Harris knew he'd have been surprised, and concerned for her.

Leah could not have told Harris how early that morning—in the chill dark of 4
A.M
.—she'd wakened with a headache—a sensation of dread for this party they'd hosted every spring, at about the time of Harris's birthday. Somehow over the years the Zalks' party in May had become a custom, or a tradition in the Institute community: their friends, colleagues, and neighbors had come to expect it. Through the long day Leah had felt stress, mounting anxiety. She was sure that Harris had been inviting guests by phone and e-mail, far-flung colleagues of
his, former students of whom there were so many, without remembering to tell her, and that far more than sixty guests would arrive at the house…

“Yes. A while…”

“How long, I wonder? Five, six years…”

“Well. That might be…”

“
You're
looking well, Mrs. Zalk!”

Now Leah remembered: this emphatic young man was the son of friends whom she and Harris saw only a few times a year, though the Gottschalks, like the Zalks, lived in the older, west-end neighborhood of University Heights. The young man had an odd first name—and he'd matured alarmingly—Leah was sure that the last time she'd seen him he'd been an adolescent of twelve or thirteen with a pudgy child's face, a shy manner, hardly Leah's height. Now he carried his excess weight well, bursting with health and vigor and an air of scarcely suppressed elation like an athlete eager to confront his competition.

He was smiling toothily, the smile of a child of whom much has been made by adoring elders. Leah felt herself resistant to his charms—wary of his attention. In a lowered voice he said, “Remember me?—‘Woods'? ‘Woods Gottschalk'? Dr. Zalk and my father used to play squash together at the gym.”

Squash! Leah was sure that Harris hadn't played that ridiculous frantic game in years.

“Of course—‘Woods.' Yes—I remember you—of course.”

In fact Leah vaguely recalled that something had happened to the Gottschalks' only son—he'd been stricken with a terrible debilitating nerve-illness, or a brain tumor—or was she confusing him with the son of other friends in University Heights? What was most disconcerting, Woods had grown so
large
, and so
mature
. So
swaggering
. She was sure she hadn't seen the Gottschalks enter her house—she wondered if Woods had dared to come alone to the party.

Woods murmured, with an air of deep sympathy: “Yes, it's been a while, Mrs. Zalk. You can be sure—I've been thinking of you.”

The blandly glowing face assumed, for a moment, a studied look of gravity. The eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses moisted over. Woods reached out for Leah—for Leah's hands—suddenly her hands were being gripped in Woods's hands—a handshake that quivered with such feeling, the rings on Leah's left hand were pressed painfully into her flesh. As if a blinding light had been turned rudely onto her face, Leah's eyes puckered at the corners.

“You've been so
brave
.”

How uneasy “Woods” was making her!—his very name obtrusive, pretentious—staring at her so avidly, hungrily—as if awaiting a response Leah couldn't provide.
Brave?
What did this brash young man mean by
brave
?

Leah didn't like it that he was smoking. That he hadn't offered to put out his cigarette. Nor had he made even a courteous gesture of shielding her from the smoke as another person might have done in similar circumstances.
She
had never smoked—had never been drawn to smoking—though her college friends had all smoked, and of course Harris had smoked, both cigarettes and a pipe, for years.

At last, Harris had given up smoking when he was in his early thirties. Proud of his
willpower
—for he'd loved his pipe—he'd smoked as many as two packs of cigarettes a day—and had done so since the age of sixteen. Giving up such a considerable habit hadn't been easy for Harris for he'd been involved in a major federal-grant project in his Institute lab that frequently required as many as one hundred work-hours a week and smoking had helped relieve the stress of those years—but Harris had done it and Leah had been proud of her husband's
willpower
.

“It's wonderful to see you smile, Mrs. Zalk! You are well—are you?”

“Yes. Of course I'm ‘well.' And you?”

Leah spoke with an edge of impatience. How annoying this young man was!

As Woods talked—chattered—Leah stared at a swath of pale blond hair falling onto Woods's forehead—yes, his hair did seem to be bleached, the roots were dark, shadowy. Yet his eyebrows appeared to
have been bleached, too. A sweetish scent of cologne wafted from his skin. Woods Gottschalk was a stocky perspiring young man yet oddly attractive, self-assured and commanding. His face was an actor's face, Leah thought—unless she meant the mask-face of a Greek actor of antiquity—as if a face of ordinary dimensions had been stretched upon a large bust of a head. The effect was brightly bland as a coin, or a moon. Lines from Santayana came to Leah—a beautiful poetic text she'd read as a graduate student decades before:
Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feelings once faithful, discreet and—
.

“As you see I've stepped outside—outside ‘time'—and slipped away from your party, Mrs. Zalk. In one of my incarnations—speaking metaphorically, of course!—I'm an emissary from Uranus—I'm a visitor
here
. People of your generation—my parents' generation—and my grandparents' generation—are so touching to me. I so admire how you carry on—you
persevere
. Well into the ‘new century,' you
persevere.
”

Leah laughed nervously. “I'm not sure what option we have, Woods.”

“Look, I know I'm being rude—circumlocution has never been my strong point. My mother used to warn me—you knew my mother, I think—you were ‘faculty wives' together—‘Take care what you say, dear, it can never be unsaid.'” Woods paused. He was breathing deeply, audibly as if he'd been running. “Just, I admire you. I'm just kidding—sort of kidding—about ‘Uranus'—being an ‘emissary.' See, I did a research project in an undergraduate course—‘History of Science'—a log of the NASA ship
Voyager
that was launched in 1977 and didn't ‘visit' Uranus until 1986—one of the ‘Ice Giants'—composed of ice and rocks—the very soul of Uranus
is
ice and rocks—but such beautiful moon-rings—twenty-seven moons, at a minimum! Uranus ate into my soul, it was a porous time in my life. Now—I am over it, I think! Mrs. Zalk—Leah?—you are looking at me so strangely, as if you don't know me! Would you care for a—cigarette?”

“Would I care for a—cigarette?” Leah stared at the blandly smiling young man as if he'd invited her to take heroin with him. “No. I would not.”

She was thinking, not only had she not seen the Gottschalks that evening in her house, she hadn't seen either Caroline or Byron—was it Byron, or Brian?—in a long time. In fact hadn't she heard that Caroline had been ill the previous spring…

“It doesn't matter, Mrs. Zalk. Really.”

“What doesn't matter?”

“Cigarettes. Smoking. If you smoke, or not. Our fates are genetic—determined at birth.” Woods paused, frowning. “Or do I mean—
conception
. Determined at
conception.
”

“Not entirely,” Leah said. “Nothing is determined
entirely.
”

“Not
entirely
. But then, Mrs. Zalk, nothing is
entire.
”

Leah wasn't sure what they were talking about and she wasn't sure she liked it. The disingenuous blue eyes gleamed at her behind round glasses. Woods was saying, with a downward glance, both self-deprecatory and self-displaying, “My case—I'm an ‘endomorph.' I had no choice about it, my fate lay in my genes. My father, and my father's father—stocky, big, with big wrists, thick stubby arms. Now Dr. Zalk, for instance—”

“‘Dr. Zalk'? What of him?”

Dr. Zalk
was Leah's husband. It made her uneasy to be speaking of him in such formal terms. Woods, oblivious of his companion, plunged on as if confiding in Leah: “My grandfather, too. You know—‘Hans Gottschalk.' He was on that team that won the Nobel Prize—or it was said, he should have been on the team. I mean, he
was
on the team—molecular biologists—Rockefeller U.—who won the prize, and he should have won a prize, too. Anyway—Hans had ceased smoking by the age of forty but it made no difference. We'd hear all about Grandfather's ‘willpower'—as if what was ordinary in another was extraordinary in him, since he was an ‘extraordinary' man—but already it was too late. Not that he knew—no one could know. Grandfather for all his genius had a genetic predisposition to—whatever invaded his lungs. So with us all—it's in the
stars
.”

“Is it!” Leah tasted cold. She had no idea what Woods was talking about except she knew that Harris would be scornful.
Stars!

“
I
think you're brave, Leah. Giving this party you give every May at about now—opening this house—that shouldn't become a mausoleum…”

And now—Woods was offering her a drink?—he'd slipped away from her party with not one but two wineglasses and a bottle of red wine? “If not a cigarette—you're right, Leah, it's a filthy habit—‘genetics' or not—how's about a drink? This Burgundy is excellent.”