Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (17 page)

The quiet thud of the front door signals Ed's return. Finding us in the bathroom, he kisses Hannah lightly—one hand gripping his briefcase, the other resting on the rise of her belly. Then he greets me with a dry peck and a grin. Ed has sprouted a few gray hairs around the temples, lessening the slightly pampered look that's always seemed incongruous alongside Hannah's sweet competence. Hannah fills him in on Elijah's condition, and Ed seems so downhearted at the news that Elijah won't be able to go to the playground that it's both laughable and endearing, and I recall once more what usually brings me around to Ed: his open adoration of his wife and son.

Ed vanishes into the bedroom to change his clothing. I start Hannah's other foot.

“So how
are
things with George?”

I stop what I'm doing and look at her. “I think,” I say, “that this could really be the guy for me.”

“Tracy, that is fantastic! I've never heard you say that about anyone. This is great!”

I focus on her toes and don't speak until I'm through. “It
is
great. It is. It's just . . . remember when we saw the Charles River break?”

“I'll never forget it.”

“Well.” I drop the clippings into the trash. “Change is fucking terrifying.”

She gives me a quizzical look. “I never thought seeing the ice break was scary, Tracy. I thought it was just cool.”

Cool.

Midnight. I curse as I set down my pen; the cartridge has ruptured, black ink staining the indents of my knuckles where I've gripped the last two hours. George and I agreed I'd work this Saturday night after we returned from dinner, so all of Sunday would be ours. Now he waits in bed, magazine in hand. I set the pen on my desk, grimace at the stack of undergraduate papers still untouched, and head to the sink to wash up.

I've just finished undressing at the side of the bed—still a self-conscious act in front of him—when he touches my shoulder.
Opening his hand, he shows me the broken pen, ink feathering into the creases of his palm.

He works carefully. The tiny prints proceed like silky animal tracks along my breastbone. Like a message slowly, finely telegraphed.

Body as text,
smirks some restive part of my brain.

The tracks progress, a foreign alphabet of touch—a question? a promise?—along the curve of my side. A dot of ink slips and blooms on the cool sheets. Gingerly I stretch alongside him.

Down my hip. Down to my thigh, where he lays his heavy head, before beginning to blow the ink dry.

Aunt Rona has just phoned my cousin Gabby with tragic news. A neighbor's son—a son Aunt Rona has had her eye on as a match for Gabby for two and a half decades—has gotten engaged to a non-Jewish woman. The couple has decided to raise any future children Protestant. The parents are in shock.

Rona is—so she announced to Gabby—beyond shock. She is stunned. Rona, unlike my mother, is an officer in the Sisterhood; throughout our childhoods she insisted that Gabby attend our Reform synagogue for every holiday, including some I'd barely heard of such as the tree birthday—for which the Sisterhood had the synagogue's progeny cavort under cardboard trees heavily festooned with green Christmas lights Rona purchased off-season.

Aunt Rona loves her religion.

This morning, on one of the gossip tears that used to prompt us to speculate that either she or my taciturn mother must have been adopted—there was no way they could be sisters—Aunt Rona phoned Gabby to expound on the disaster.
I've known Jonathan since he was a boy. His poor parents. All those years you raise your child, you teach him and look after him . . . what a waste.

Gabby is incensed. A waste of a life? Just because Jonathan isn't raising his own children Jewish? What about all the wonderful qualities Jonathan possesses, all the reasons his parents treasure him? Have these things suddenly vanished? Won't he pass some of them on to his Protestant children?

My ear still aching from the pressure of the telephone receiver and Gabby's outrage (her heated defense of Jonathan's choices hinting that she might not have been entirely indifferent to him), I find
George seated on a stool in my kitchenette, bent over the newspaper in bright autumn light. He's unshaven, dressed in a faded blue T-shirt and sweatpants. As I relate the telephone conversation he passes me my coffee. It's delicious: the coffee, the day-old garlic pizza in its soggy box, my indignation. Both of us tousled. Smelling, frankly, like sex.

Brushing the hairs on his forearm with my fingertips, I let out a yawn. “Aunt Rona is a bit extreme that way.”

He swallows a mouthful of coffee and considers. “I wouldn't call her extreme.”

I sit on a stool beside him. “Well, okay. I know that compared to fundamentalists she's mild. But in the context of my almost totally nonobservant family, you know.”

“What I mean is, I think she's right.”

“Right about what?”

George lowers his mug. “It
is
a waste when someone walks away from his upbringing. I'm a waste to my father.”

“How can you say that?”

“No need to prettify my situation, Tracy.” He studies the mug in his hands, then looks up at me. His voice is dead calm. “I'm not afraid to call it what it is: I failed my father.”

“Your father failed you too,” I offer with a heat I don't entirely understand.

“Okay, true.” He pauses. “Yes he did. But I'm through blaming him—he's not capable of understanding me. All I'm saying is, there's something important about sticking with your kin and upbringing. I had to get out, but I'm no shining example of virtue. If I could have stayed, I would have. That business about honoring your parents is a good idea, no matter whether it was a person or a deity who wrote it.” He offers an apologetic smile. “Family is the center of everything. Speaking of which”—he turns his stool and positions himself to face me—“do you want children?”

I laugh.

“What's so funny?”

“That was just—abrupt.”

“Was it?” He shrugs.

In the quiet kitchen, George waiting, I find it difficult to enunciate my feelings. I've always thought I might like to have children. In theory. In truth the alchemy of love has always seemed a
more pressing question than its byproduct. Kids—how many and when—are not a subject I've given sustained consideration. Do I want children? I assume I will. Most people eventually do.

Don't they?

“I think I do,” I say.

“Because I'd like a pack of them.”

“A pack?”

He nods.

“How many come in a pack?”

“It's just a wish,” he says.

There it is again. That hopeful look. It washes powerfully across his face. I watch, uncertain, caught for a moment in its undertow.

He presses on. “How would your parents take it if you married a non-Jew?”

I shrug. “They'd get used to it.” In truth my parents are so obviously relieved that I'm dating anyone—so quick to forgive George's failure to be Jewish—it's a bit insulting. “They'd respect you, and be a little shy around you and . . .” I can't help smiling at this image. At the fact that George and I are—aren't we?—hypothesizing about a future. “They'd love you. Judaism not mandated.”

His brow is furrowed. “I'd convert so we could raise our kids right.”

Three responses collide in me: euphoria at his directness; anxiety at his directness; confusion.

“Why would conversion be an issue?”

“Clarity,” he says.

I wait. He doesn't elaborate.

“Who says kids have to have a homogeneous religion,” I say, “or any religion for that matter, to grow up well?”

“Structure is important. Stability. Clarity of morals. People's roles in their community.”

I can't help laughing. “But look how you and I live: like loose atoms bouncing around Manhattan. Now we're bouncing together, and that makes me happy.” I hesitate. “Happier than I've ever been, George.”

His smile lights his face.

“I'm sure there's a lot to be gained from religion,” I say. “Sometimes I suspect the difference between someone without a clear faith and someone with may be the difference between a stick of wood and a cello. But I can't overlook all the harm religion does. And I don't think we need some big structured community to have meaningful lives.”

“It's important, though,” he argues, “when you start a family. Community plays a part in a stable life, and gives everyone a distinct role to play.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, for example, in a healthy community, men and women have contributions to make . . .
different
contributions.” He rubs his head, musing. “That's the problem I have with American feminism—it tries to make everything unisex.” His hair lifts at the passage of his hand, then slowly fans back into place. “It tries to upend everything. Plus it lacks humor.”

I am daily falling more deeply in love with this man. He makes me laugh. He is a grownup. He is good-looking, considerate, sexually generous. And he's speaking a language I don't recognize. It is at this point that I realize how profoundly I want him not to turn out to be a closet reactionary. My hand, resting on his forearm, looks yellow against his pink-toned skin.

“Feminists have great senses of humor,” I say. “I for example think everything is funny. I think sexism is hilarious.”

“You consider yourself a feminist?” He looks genuinely startled. “I thought your whole complaint about Yolanda's play was that it was feminist.”

“No. No, no, no. My complaint was that it was bad art. That it was so busy making a political point—which happened to be a somewhat tired feminist one—that it blotted out all nuance.” As I say this, I have the vague sense there was something beyond the play's hackneyed politics that spurred my condemnation of
Why the Flower Loves the Rod.
The unbearable spectacle, perhaps, of a woman deliberately turning over her trust to a man who would not treat it kindly? It occurs to me that what bothered me most was not the play's obvious flaws . . . but that sitting in the theater next to George, watching a woman risk her heart, was intolerable.

A line of thought I do not, at the moment, wish to share with George. “I don't have to agree with every feminist on the planet to consider myself one—which I do, George. I'm garden-variety,
mind you. I'm no Dworkin and I'm no crusading castrator—but then almost no feminists are. That's a peculiar cultural fantasy, this business of the man-eating feminist. Mostly I want things like equal job opportunities. And huge international pressure on those countries that do horrible things to women.” I pause. ”But can we take this back a step? What were you saying just before, about women's roles?”

“Career is fine,” he explains, his voice friendly. He rests a warm hand on my knee. “Career is great. Of course it is, Tracy. So long as a woman isn't so ambitious she puts it ahead of family.”

“All right. Can I assume the same is true for men?”

He wags his head. “Women have a special role in the family. A lot of women make the mistake of not realizing that. Listen, I think it was pathetic that my father refused to learn to cook after my mother died—that we ate macaroni until Paula and I took up the challenge and learned how to cook. But when my father used to say ‘a woman makes a home,' he wasn't entirely wrong. When my mother died, it wasn't a home anymore. It just wasn't.”

I hesitate. “Don't you think that had something to do with how your father acted, though? I mean, wouldn't it have been a home—even if there was nothing more than macaroni to eat—if he'd approached his kids with warmth, instead of . . .”

George watches me. “Judgment?” he fills in.

I nod.

He purses his lips, then shakes his head. “I can't imagine it.”

I can't ask George the next question that pops into my mind: Does he think his mother got a fair deal, stood up for herself, felt she had choices? But it's too delicate a query for a heated moment. And too soon for me to touch that subject with George. I retrench. “Forgive me for saying so,” I say, “but ‘special role' has always sounded like a sugarcoating for stay at home and clean up everybody's mess.”

He stops to consider this. “Why are you so suspicious of traditional structures?”

“Because women have traditionally gotten screwed over.”

“Why are you so angry about motherhood?”

I stare at him for a full minute. I'm trying to sort out whether he knows how he sounds . . . or whether he's simply innocent of experience with this sort of conversation. “If you want a history
lesson in misogyny,” I say softly, ”I'll give you a mind-boggling reading list.”

His jaw flexes. “Are you an angry woman?”

It's with effort that I stay seated. “I am not
an angry woman,
George. I am a reasonable person who happens to get angry for a few specific and compelling reasons. Because if I'd been born thirty years earlier, or into a different kind of family, I wouldn't be doing the work I love now. Because most girls in the world don't have my opportunities. Meanwhile, be careful when you chastise a woman for political anger—you should be glad to be with a woman who can
say
she's angry, as opposed to all those women who never admit to being angry. Who say
fine
when they mean
fuck you
and spend their lives emotionally pretzel-knotted, depressed, and untrustworthy.”

He tilts his head. His face, the face that's become, for me, synonymous with welcome, catches the warm light from the window . . . and he laughs aloud. “Let me get this straight: I'm supposed to be
glad
you're angry at me?”

“You bet.”

“That's—”

“But what's more important is that you know who I am. I'm moved that you offer to convert. I'm touched. More than touched. But I don't want you to. And I'm a professor, George, and serious about my career. If you have other requirements in mind for your mate, or if you want someone who's going to march in lockstep with some community or religious mores, then I'm not the woman for you.” There is a sour taste in my mouth: garlic, coffee, fear. This man lifted me in his arms last night, and my mind stopped—actually ceased contradicting and observing and made room for something new. We made love like some impossible sailing Calder sculpture barely needing to touch ground. Gentleness and force in balance. Now I experience full-body confusion. Somehow we've pivoted from unprecedented tenderness to what sounds like the verge of a breakup. I speak his name. Anyone stepping into the room unaware might think the quaver in my voice is anger.