The Sixteenth of June (3 page)

He still didn't believe her when he went to Pine Grove that afternoon. His grandmother had never fully recovered from the embolism, but just recently he had thought that she was starting to look better. She had died at dawn on Wednesday, alone.

The conductor looks menacing as he comes forward, snapping the jaws of his punch. The expert commuters all have their tickets out, badges of veteran experience. Stephen unfurls the receipt of his one-way peak fare, a scroll with a hieroglyph of symbols. He'd been informed at the information desk that his ten-trip ticket couldn't be used. Four unpunched slots remain: [7] [8] [9] [10]. He'd never imagined that he might not use it in its entirety. How long will it sit now in his wallet, a reminder?

The conductor swipes his receipt, punches it, and walks off with it in hand, muttering, “Tickets! Tickets!” Stephen does not have a chance to object, to ask if he will need it later, much less to inquire—as he had planned—if cabs are available at his stop. The synagogue is three miles from the station, he had been told.

Next Tuesday, he reflects. Tuesday will be the longest day.

A rustle of paper from the man seated beside him, scrawling away on a yellow legal pad. Stephen watches him, his pen flying. Stephen needs for the ride to be productive. He knows this but resists it. He hates toting around his briefcase on the day of her funeral.

But life didn't stop for her. His EGL 220 class had continued, Stephen standing in front of them on Thursday (yesterday! Just yesterday) feeling drained. The show must go on, he had thought, leaning on the lectern.

He could have canceled class; no one would have faulted him. But he's been putting in the bare minimum as it is. His lectures have grown shorter. He grades hastily. Paradoxically, this has resulted in his students' perking up, deciding he isn't so bad. The less of himself he puts into the class, it seems, the more they like him.

His briefcase holds a thick stack of Milton essays in one compartment and a thin sheath of dissertation notes in the other. It isn't a choice, really. He can't bear to face his proposal. He isn't sufficiently caffeinated, adrenaline-charged, amped. It will likely sit untouched until the last possible moment: 2:00 a.m., the night before a meeting with Stuart, nervous energy flooding his system as he curses himself for having neglected it.

His efforts thus far have yielded little more than multicolored stickies in various books.
Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern
had achieved the status of a sea creature, teeming with colorful protrusions like a coral reef. Meanwhile, titles flit through his mind, which he jots down in his notebook. Long paragraphs should be filling it. Instead he has single lines with clumsy edits:

The Caves Behind the Characters: Interiority in Virginia Woolf

The Unwritten Novel: Subjectivity in Woolf (and Eliot?)

The Parallax View: The Subject's Gaze
in Woolf and Eliot
in Modernism

Stephen isn't clear on what the parallax view is, but he had spotted it while skimming
Ž
i
ž
ek. Citing Slavoj Žižek makes him feel brave, those Eastern European consonants, with their feel of currency. Žižek:
cha-ching
! The snappy syllables make Stephen a theorist, one of those hip academics who wears Doc Martens and participates in protests.

Stephen's dissertation will involve Virginia Woolf. This much he knows. Increasingly, there is Freud, creeping in like a draft from a window, but Stephen does not mind. There is poetry in the Freud, and his German is finally coming in handy.

The rest is up in the air, a nebulous mix that makes him feel as though he is trying to capture the weather in a net. He has moments when he thinks he is onto something. These occur late at night, his mind igniting, surrounded by books. It is a heady feeling, thinking he has the thread of something, that he need only hold on. “So, too, Woolf implies with all fiction writing: our subjects always escape, leaving us only with the truth of our impressions.”
YES!!!
he writes in the margin. He goes to bed exhausted but satisfied, relieved that he has made some progress.

But in the morning, he cannot decipher his notes. “The novel is always unwritten, coming apart,” reads one sticky note. What on earth does it mean? None of the previous night's understanding comes back to him.
The Writer as Reader in Modernism
has been added to his list of titles. He is embarrassed by his chicken scratchings, by the spark he felt. Who will ever read these words? What is their point?

Across the aisle he notices a woman gazing out the window as they bump along. She wears a wool coat, and her toddler leans against her, on her way to sleep. The girl's shoes point up at the ceiling; she is small enough that her legs don't meet the seat's edge. Her hair spills across her mother's coat, laced with static. A folded stroller sits on the luggage rack above them along with a patterned diaper bag.

A bump causes the electricity to flicker, and Stephen realizes he has been staring. Always this. Watching people around him and wondering, wondering instead of working. But the woman gazing out the window captivates him more than anything in his briefcase.

Stephen's work does not call out to him in this way. It does not speak to him of secrets and stories. He wonders about the woman. He imagines a divorce, something that makes her look away rather than stroke her daughter's hair. To know more about her would be to have some riddle solved. An unwritten novel is in each of us, Woolf would say.

The people at the funeral today will smile blankly if he tries to explain any of this. They will remember the term papers they wrote in college. They will think what he does is frivolous.

Stephen sighs and unclasps his briefcase. For the first time, the legal-pad activity pauses. He can feel his seat companion take in the rubber-banded stack of essays, surveying them with interest. Teacher? Writer? Stephen is glad the top essay has
Professor Portman
typed in the upper-right corner.

He will grade the papers as quickly as he can, a benevolent line at the end of each with some mix of positive and negative to indicate the tip of the grade. He will put his head down, mirroring the intense concentration of the man beside him, and work until the name of his destination rings out.

At the synagogue he will embrace his parents and pay his respects to his grandmother. Only you, he thinks. Only you knew how much I will miss you. He bows his head for the grandmother he has lost. As if it is not for some part of himself, too, that he mourns.

Four

S
even years. Nora gazes out the window, watching the trees roll past.

Saying the number aloud that morning had come as a shock. How had she lived through those years without ever doing the math? Of course it was seven, but it had somehow felt like one, darkening until the lights went out. She and her mom had been stranded on an island, the tropic of cancer with its thickets of growth, while for everyone else life continued, unerring and plain.

Does knowing the number help? Do you have to feel the slap a thousand times to grow numb to it? The words of the song come back to her.
The very thought of you / And I forget to do / The little ordinary things / That everyone ought to do
.

Leo signals for the exit ramp.

She'd started with each of the shrinks optimistically, coming home and telling Leo that this one, this one seemed promising. Leo was intent on being supportive. “This is something you need help with,” he said earnestly. She couldn't tell if he meant the grief or the pulling, or something more broad that couldn't be named.

Leo's form of therapy is action: pickup basketball, a project around the apartment. “People get too stuck in their heads,” he likes to say. She studies his profile beside her: black hair, brown eyes, stubble visible even at this early hour. Stephen has June's fair elegance, but Leo is stockier, resembling neither of his parents. Like the car he drives, he is a dark horse.

“A jet would be more fuel efficient,” Stephen remarked the day Leo got the keys. Leo had saved for the Escalade since college, dreaming of its acquisition, and he made everyone come outside to admire it. “A lease!” June exclaimed. “Who leases? I still don't understand why you won't let us help.” How quickly that check would have been written, her manicured hand drawing the orange Hermès checkbook from her desk drawer. But that wasn't Leo. He waved off his mother's offer and turned to Stephen. “My guess is you'll be bumming rides within a week.”

When Leo looked at the Escalade, he didn't see a gas-guzzling SUV. He didn't see a car bigger than their city needs. He saw the achievement of his own industry, his drive summed up by what he drove.

When something truly bothers him, he polishes his beloved car, parking it by his parents' place on Delancey so that he can use their hose. He doesn't mind the pedestrians walking by as he waxes the black finish to a mirrored shine. “Hey,” he says, nodding, working the rag in circles as though he is the neighborhood bartender. People always smile and nod back, pleased by the industrious man taking such admirable care of his car.

And it works for him. When he returns to the apartment, Nora can tell some change has taken place, as though he is the one who had been buffed and cleansed, his troubles shed in the gray water running down the drain. He comes through the door whistling, and it seems impossible that anything had ever bothered him at all.

She sees the same expression on people's faces when she performs with Carol's choir on Sundays. Everyone emerges from the pews looking renewed, reconnected with some vital impulse. It is the feeling she hoped the shrinks would bring. She imagined returning from one of those appointments lighter, unburdened. “Hey, you,” Leo would say, surprised. She would smile back, happy to feel some of the weight lifted.

“We'll be there in a minute,” Leo announces. They are following the main road, historic and quaint, a Pennsylvania town rooted in time.

“I forgot to ask you before,” she says, turning to him. “Will there be a cemetery?”

“Hmn?”

“With Jewish funerals. I wasn't sure what happens.”

“A burial,” Leo replies. “There's a family plot, where my grandfather is.”

“And no one at the service knows. About the party tonight, I mean.”

Leo checks the rearview. “Well, they haven't been invited. Sharon and those guys. They wouldn't get it, you know?”

Nora can hear the internalization of Michael's words, the loyalty of son to father, and she softens. She is too hard on Leo sometimes, critical when she doesn't need to be. It was sweet of him to put out breakfast like that, on the nice tray. “He's good to you, that one,” her mom once observed. The plastic kidney-bean receptacle sat beneath her mom's chin, holding the thick bile she brought up. “He'd rub your feet every night if you asked.” “Mom!” Nora had protested, embarrassed, but she knew her mom was right.

Leo hadn't seemed like the doting type when they started dating. “A
frat
guy?” her roommate, Claudia, asked incredulously. “You're dating a frat guy from BU? That's a total party school.” “Whatever,” Nora replied. “It's not like it's serious.”

And it wasn't, at first. Leo was an experiment. It was her sophomore year. Sophomore slump, they called it. Little did Nora know that her life would soon be getting upended. When her mom got diagnosed that spring, the thought of having once craved adventure made Nora laugh.

She'd met Leo the summer after her freshman year. “Take the train into Philly!” Stephen had urged over the phone. “It's a cultural mecca out here compared to Union.” She went to see him in early August, a sweltering and humid weekend. She set her bags down in the foyer, craning her neck to take in the grand sweep of staircase. “Holy shit,” she whispered. “This is like Wayne Manor.” A round table in the entry held a spectacular arrangement of white tulips, curving haughtily toward her. Nora felt a pang of trepidation and wondered whether the clothes she'd packed were nice enough. And right at that moment, Leo came crashing down the stairs in a ratty T-shirt and gym shorts. “What's up?” he said, passing her, headphones over his ears.

“Off to the gym again,” Stephen murmured. “His home away from home.”

“You didn't say your brother would be here.” Cute, she thought appreciatively, watching him lope out the door.

“That's because I wanted you to come. Leopold is like the missing link to the Neanderthals.”

Nora barely spoke to Leo that weekend, seeing him only in passing—on his way to meet friends, heading out to play basketball. He had long, dark lashes and a bright easy smile, with a confident ease about him. He wasn't intimidated by his older brother and barely seemed to notice her. A jock, she figured.

That fall, Leo came down to New Haven for a concert. “Phish,” Stephen informed her. “God help us all.” The three of them met for drinks, crowding together at a bar. Nora sensed Leo's interest from across the table, a flicker of it undeniably there. Stephen was a junior, she a sophomore, Leo a freshman, and she imagined them as Russian dolls, nesting inside one another. A perfect fit.

“So you're a singer,” he said when Stephen got up to get the next round.

“Opera.”

“Any shows coming up?”

“Sunday, actually.”

“Sunday? Like, this Sunday?”

“Yup.”

“As in, the day-after-tomorrow Sunday?”

“That's the one.”

“Well. How 'bout that.” He grinned at her wolfishly, and Nora felt a thrill travel through her. She began to wonder if he'd known about her performance all along. If maybe he'd noticed her that weekend in August after all.

“I could date him,” Nora mused to Stephen that night as they walked back to campus. Stephen rolled his eyes, not thinking she was serious. Sunday, when Leo came to her show, she knew she hadn't been imagining it.

She sang as she always did, immersed in the piece, aware of the audience only vaguely. “You must feel them,” Renata Scotto advised imperiously. “Without being controlled by them.” But after the lights came up, she sensed Leo watching. She felt his gaze in the roses at her feet.

He sought her out in the lobby. “You were incredible,” he breathed. She smiled. Stephen, beside him, frowned.

“Nora, he's a
freshman
,” Stephen told her later. As if she didn't already know.

Leo was supposed to be a fling. But he had surprised her. Leo was like that dress you tried out on a whim, expecting it to be all wrong, only to find with a shock before the mirror that it worked.

One weekend in November, a few weeks later, he came down to visit her. She returned to her apartment from the music library to find dinner waiting: spaghetti, meatballs, garlic bread, and chocolate cake for dessert.

“You did all this?” She stood in the doorway, still in her coat, the cramped kitchen emanating warm, delicious smells.

He smiled, drying a pan.

“This surprised me,” she confessed after the meal, the two of them lingering at the table. Claudia was at the library, studying for an exam.

“Why? Because guys don't cook?”

“No. It's just—I know you never had to. That you guys always had this stuff taken care of for you.”

“Yeah, well . . .” He made a face. A white taper jammed into an empty beer bottle started to drip wax onto the table. Leo fingered it, rolling it into a ball. “There was this restaurant back in the city—in New York, I mean, before we moved. We used to go down to it like it was an extension of the apartment. It was this little Italian place. We knew the waiters, the maître d'. We always got the exact same thing. And I hated it.

“When I got to college, it was like I could finally do stuff on my own. Cooking, laundry. I'd literally never used an oven before. How weird is that?”

Nora regarded him. “What made you want to?” Truthfully, this side of Leo made her uneasy. She sometimes wondered if Stephen might be gay—her tall, handsome friend, perpetually unattached. Coming home that night to the sight of Leo with a dish towel over his shoulder, she felt a pang of concern.

“Because I don't want to live like that,” he said flatly. “Dependent on everyone for everything. It was a weird way to grow up, in Manhattan. My dad grew up without much. Not, you know, rich. And the stories he'd tell, about never wearing nice clothes, or having to eat leftovers all week—it sounded nice.”

“Being poor?” Nora stared at her empty wineglass.

“No,” he said, refilling it. “Being
normal
.”

Stephen had described Leo as if he were Homer Simpson: a beer-loving, doughnut-eating relic whose oafish ways were as much a source of chagrin as they were comic fodder. But watching him, Nora understood that his family had him all wrong.

After dinner, he came around to her side of the table and knelt by her chair. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, gently, differently from how they had kissed before. He gazed at her, as if to say, Now you know me. And then he undressed her, his movements tender, both of them caught in a spell. They made love right there, the candle still going, its wax pooling on the table. They didn't even bother locking the door or thinking about her roommate. Later, Nora was never able to look at that creaky chair the same way.

They didn't leave a single corner of that apartment untouched. The bathroom, with its filthy bath mats. The kitchen, against the refrigerator. Even on campus, that time in the garden, the lilacs all around. Leo wasn't her first—there had been a couple of guys her freshman year—but he was the first one who knew what he was doing. The first who made a study of her body.

“Here we are,” Leo says beside her, yanking on the parking brake. Nora starts. “You okay there?”

She nods and looks up. The synagogue is brick, squat. It is more modest than she was expecting, a housewife in an apron instead of a supermodel, soaring and tall.

“Hang on a sec.” Leo frowns. “Looks like I missed a call.”

She tries to recall when they last made love. It has been longer than she would've thought possible, back when they knew how every night would end. “Let's never become one of those couples,” she once told him. “Those boring, sexless couples.” He had nodded fervently, the thought unimaginable to them both.

He must miss it. But how to have that conversation? “We used to—” she might begin, but then what? She would find herself at a loss, unsure how to proceed, not wanting to put him on the spot. Their old life was on the other side of a chasm. To allude to it only emphasized how far it really was.

If only she could find the right words, but they remain out of reach. Even with Michael today. What words are there? “We're both motherless!” Or “Welcome to the club!” These are not the things to say, even if they are true.

She looks out across the parking lot, where two smokers linger. Maybe there are no perfect words. One of the smokers takes a deep, long drag. Maybe that's the point.

“Ugh,” Leo mutters, snapping the phone shut.

She turns to him. “What was that about?”

“Stephen. Did he tell you how he was getting here?”

“He took the train. I thought you knew.”

“Well, he's not here, apparently. My mom left a couple of voice mails. Like they don't have enough to deal with today.”

Nora is about to reply that she's sure Stephen is on his way. But then she sees a familiar figure emerge from a taxicab, a green-and-orange vehicle in the circular drive. Stephen holds his briefcase and an umbrella (not a collapsing one, she notes, but a full-length one with a wooden handle, which is so exactly Stephen). She has a fleeting impression of Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins
—that tall, lanky frame—and half expects him to kick his heels together. A giggle escapes her.

“Oh, he's right there. No harm done.” She turns to open her door, eager to see her friend, but there is a muted series of clicks. The door resists her, unyielding.

“Did you just lock me in?” She turns to Leo. “Seriously?”

“Just listen for a second, before you go running out. ‘Stephen, Stephen!' ” He dons a shrill voice and does a silly wave, a young wife running to greet her man back from the service.

Nora folds her arms across her chest. You aren't attractive when you do that, she wants to tell him. That high-pitched-voice thing.