The World Without You (38 page)

“What if he’s not really dead?” says Noelle.

“What do you mean, what if he’s not really dead?”

“What if he’s missing in action?”

“He’s not missing in action, Noelle. He was a journalist, not a soldier. And his body was flown back. Don’t you remember?”

“You’re saying you never imagined it?”

Of course she did. Those last few weeks in New York, standing in the dark beside the East River, while behind her the trucks cast their lights on her like stun guns, moving in procession down the FDR Drive. Queens was across the river, and beyond it, if she could only train her eyes, she could see all the way to Iraq.

And later, in Berkeley, already with Wyeth, she would say to herself,
What if Leo came back now?

And a month later:
How about now?

And now?

A memory comes to her, she and Leo going to the Price Chopper in Great Barrington, grocery list in hand, trying to decipher Marilyn’s handwriting. One time, they had to turn around and go back to the house because they couldn’t read what she’d written. Marilyn herself couldn’t figure it out; it was only later that she remembered.
Bagged carrots!
And Leo’s handwriting was even worse than hers. Last month, Thisbe found in her apartment a note Leo had written her.
Off for a run. Be back in an hour.
And for a moment it pierced her, and she needed to know when the note had been written and where Leo had run, before she allowed herself to ask the more obvious question: how had the note gotten there, across the country from where she and Leo had lived, moving with her from apartment to apartment, adhering to her like flypaper? She’d found it in her wallet, which surprised her: she wasn’t someone who kept things. That had been Leo’s task; he was a secret sentimentalist. Though sometimes she wondered whether it was sentimentality as much as an aversion to cleaning up. She thinks of his bachelor days at Wesleyan, if someone in college could even be called a bachelor, but he certainly lived like one. Having failed to sign up for the college meal plan, he lived for semesters at a time off pizza and ramen noodles. He ate from a set of rubber camping dishes that he kept in his dresser drawer, and whenever they got dirty he would dump them into the shower and rinse them off with shampoo. The problem was, he didn’t own a dish drainer, so he would place the dishes, still wet, back into his dresser, and soon the wood would start to warp, the dishes to mold. His refrigerator was a specimen lab. A milk carton from every month, he liked to say. You could carbon date things with it.

And suddenly she can’t sit here anymore, letting naked Noelle drip-dry beside her in the fast-descending sun while in the distance James Taylor is crooning to whomever he’s crooning to, and now the fireworks are starting to go off, issuing their staccato clamor. “Would you get dressed already?”

Noelle stands up. She’s still in her paisley kerchief and nothing else, and this time, as she bends over her pile of clothes, Thisbe looks away: she’s not going to be forced to stare at her genitals. Noelle puts on her underwear, her bra, her blouse, her skirt, moving methodically, unhurriedly, seeming to dare Thisbe to rush her. Now she’s fully clothed except for her socks, which she puts on, methodically as well, and her rollerblades, which she begins to lace. Thisbe is still sitting beside her, staring out at the lake, which in the growing darkness looms before them like a dark blue dish, and for the first time the words
Stockbridge Bowl
make sense to her.

She recalls Noelle’s speech at the memorial, the story she told about Leo holding the
havdalah
candle, saying he’d marry her again. And his words to Noelle.
I’m thinking about her. The next time you talk to her, please tell her that.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” she says. “When Leo said those words to you? Even when he was in Iraq, I talked to him every couple of days. Yet you could go months without speaking to him.”

“So?”

“It’s not like you two were close.”

Noelle is silent.

“Then why did he ask you to tell me that?”

“Beats me.”

“It was as if he knew we’d never speak again. Come on, Noelle. What are you hiding from me?”

But Noelle has taken off. She’s gliding away, out past the clearing, skating along the blacktop up toward historic Lenox.

“Wait, Noelle! Come back!”

Noelle turns around.

“That weekend Leo visited you, did he seem reckless?”

“In Jerusalem?” Noelle says.. Leo had Shabbat dinner at her and Amram’s house. He dandled his nephews on his knee. How reckless could a person be doing that?
It’s not like you two were close.
Thisbe probably meant no harm with those words, but they cut into her just the same. Well, maybe they weren’t close, but Noelle would like to remind Thisbe that she preceded her by years. Leo was twenty-one when he met Thisbe; Noelle knew him his whole life.
K’heref ayin.
Like the blink of an eye. The whole world is like that for God. And, for a moment, Noelle feels like God herself. The last one to see her brother alive. Standing balanced on her rollerblades at the side of the road, her head covering in place, exuding the cool she always strives for but that consistently eludes her, she looks at her sister-in-law with a malevolent calm.

And Thisbe stares back at her just as malevolently. Foolish Noelle with her religious code, her sundry enjoinders and prohibitions, Thisbe’s fatuous former sister-in-law standing kerchiefed on rollerblades at the side of the road a couple of miles from her parents’ house. The last person to see Leo alive. This is what Thisbe has been waiting for. To talk to Noelle. Yet what was she hoping would happen? That she would tell Noelle about that night on the telephone, when she asked Leo for a separation? That she would admit it was the last time they ever spoke? And what was she hoping for in return? That Noelle would tell her whether Leo had been reckless? That she’d say if he killed himself? As if Noelle would know, Noelle, who knew little about Leo when he was alive and who knows even less about him now that he’s gone. Did Leo put himself in harm’s way? Of course he did. He was putting himself in harm’s way from the instant he was born.

It’s unseemly, Thisbe thinks, to blame herself for Leo’s death. There’s something tawdry about it, to give herself that kind of credit, to accept that kind of blame, to be so self-dramatic when she knows that to say, “Hate me, it’s all my fault” is a way, paradoxically, of not taking responsibility for everything that’s happened since then. “Forget it,” she says, because what difference does it make what Noelle says? There’s nothing Noelle can tell her, nothing at all. She turns on her rollerblades and heads back up the hill. Noelle can follow her if she wants to, and if she doesn’t, that’s fine, too. Thisbe doesn’t care if she ever sees her again.

When she arrives at the house, the family is dispersed, a person here, a person there, as if someone strewed them across the floor.

“How was your workout?” Lily asks.

“Okay,” says Thisbe. “Terrible.”

It’s dark now, and the fireworks have really started to go off. They’re lighting up the sky with stars and arrows and other points of light, every shape Thisbe can fathom. “I hate fireworks.”

“Join the club,” Lily says. “I sent my father out to buy ear plugs. I should have told him to buy nose plugs too. The whole town smells like sausage.”

But David hasn’t gotten far, because when Thisbe enters the living room she finds him on the couch, listlessly tapping a badminton racquet against his knee.

“Where are the kids?”

“Watching baseball,” he says. “American pastime.”

Sure enough, when Thisbe gets upstairs, she finds the TV playing in the boys’ bedroom. The cousins are lying on the floor, their heads propped against their rolled-up sleeping bags.

“Explain baseball to me,” Calder says, and Thisbe, not much of a baseball fan herself, feels suddenly remiss and strangely un-American for having failed to teach her son about baseball. She starts to tell him about the Cyclones, the Mets minor league team on Coney Island, how she and his father used to watch them play, and afterward they would stroll on the boardwalk past the amusement park, the Cyclone roller coaster plunging down its tracks, and on toward the aquarium where they had gotten married.

But Calder wants to know about the rules of baseball. “What is everyone trying to do?”

So Thisbe, sitting on the floor beside him, does her best to make things clear. “To start with,” she says, “there are two teams.”

The fireworks are still exploding when she reaches Wyeth. She’s down in the basement, and she can feel the noise rattling the house.

“It sounds like you’re in a bunker.”

“I am,” she says. “I’ve been watching the rocket’s red glare. It will be coming to you soon on tape delay.” She takes a quick breath. “Wyeth, please. Get me out of here.”

“Has it been bad?”

“Terrible. What was I thinking? I shouldn’t have come.” Her shirt has come out of her shorts, and she tucks it back inside, but it emerges again. “I’m all right,” she assures him.

“Are you?”

She doesn’t know. Or knows in only the vaguest, most fleeting sense: a shadow on the wall of a cave. What’s wrong is she’s here and Wyeth’s there. She should have brought him with her. He’s her boyfriend; she had every right to insist that he come. The blood funnels to her head.
I will always be part of your family.
She said those words, not because she meant them but because she believed she was supposed to say them, that flying across the country for your dead husband required you to make a pronouncement. So she made one. But saying those words made her feel them.
We shall do and we shall listen.
Noelle was right. What if she dropped out of graduate school and never came back? What if she stayed in Lenox? The idea is preposterous, but the fact that she can entertain it, even as whimsy, makes her lose her breath.

“Do you want me to come get you?” Wyeth says. “I could catch the next flight to Boston.”

“Oh, Wyeth, you can’t do that.”

“I could be at the airport in less than an hour.”

He could, no doubt. Threading his way through traffic, finding seams between cars where none exist. Once, watching Wyeth drive, Thisbe thought, Who said you can’t fit a camel through the eye of a needle?

But it wouldn’t work. He’d cast a pall over the event, her gallant horseman come to rescue her, and, she fears, she wouldn’t feel rescued. Wyeth would arrive with his cheer and good intentions and he’d be received like a burglar who’s jacked open the door, a cold draft coming into the house. For an instant, she longs for an age she never knew, when you lived where you grew up and you died there too, when the world that lay beyond you was only for the imagining and you waited for a letter from the boy you loved, up late in his bedroom mooning over you, sending you flares in the middle of the night. Back in Berkeley, after Calder has gone to sleep, she likes to sit beside Wyeth while she reads a book, listening to him speak on the phone. Wyeth talking. It’s the background melody to her life. “Wyeth,” she says. “I want to move in with you.”

“You do?”

“If you’ll still have me, that is.”

He laughs. “Why wouldn’t I still have you?”

“I thought maybe you met someone while I was gone.”

“Thisbe, you’ve been gone for less than seventy-two hours.”

“You’re a fast worker,” she says. “At least you were with me.”

She knows what he’s thinking, and what he’s good enough not to say. That she was a fast worker with him, too.

“Have you told Calder?”

“Not yet,” she says, “but he’ll be thrilled. He’s your biggest booster.”

And there he is, Calder, at the top of the stairs, looking down at her in the basement. Someone has given him a cookie. Just as likely, he’s given one to himself. Though she’s been known to give herself a little pre-bedtime treat, too. It’s ten o’clock at night, and he has a sugar high; with any luck, he’ll sleep on the plane.

“Wyeth?” she says. “Can I change my mind about tomorrow? Will you pick me up at the airport?”

“I’ll be waiting at the gate,” he says. “I’ll be the guy in the chauffeur’s hat holding the lease.”

And she’ll be the woman with the suitcase waiting to sign it. It’s Calder’s bedtime.. It’s past bedtime for them both. She can hear voices on the first floor. And he’s walking toward her now, Calder, come to greet her in his footed pajamas, making his way down the stairs.

14

It’s not even seven-thirty when Clarissa hears a noise downstairs. A door opens and shuts. She rolls over into the crook of Nathaniel’s elbow.

“It’s the milkman.” Still asleep, and Nathaniel is already poking fun at her, playing on her credulity and hauteur. He used to try to convince her that when he was a boy there was no milk in the supermarkets of Nebraska City; it was all delivered by the milkman. No telephones either, so he was forced to communicate through a Styrofoam cup extended by string to his friend’s house.

Awake now, Clarissa gets out of bed and turns on the computer.

“Checking e-mail?”

She nods. She hasn’t checked e-mail the whole holiday. She needs to know what she’s supposed to worry about.

“Does that mean I have to check e-mail, too?” If the world can be divided between those who check e-mail whenever they can and those who check e-mail only when forced to, Nathaniel is squarely in the latter camp. He turns on the computer with anticipatory regret. Every time he thinks, What am I going to be asked to do now? He puts on his boxers, and now out pops his head through the hole in his T-shirt. He’s sitting half-clothed on the bed.

Clarissa turns off the computer and lies back down beside him. “The world hasn’t ended, as far as I can tell.”

Noelle, meanwhile, is already awake in the room next door. Her flight back to Israel leaves this evening, and she hasn’t begun to pack. Just in time for their return, the boys’ internal clocks have adjusted to the States. They lie stone cold atop their sleeping bags as Noelle traffics in and out of their room, picking up their laundry and a couple of stray toothbrushes, removing their clean clothes from the dresser drawers and depositing them in their suitcase. There’s a stain on the floor (Could it possibly be jam? She told them not to eat outside the kitchen), and she goes into the bathroom and brings back a washcloth and now, on her knees, she tries to rub the stain out, but it’s caked like tar to the wood.