As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (27 page)

“What’s the matter?” Estelle asked, having risen from bed and returned downstairs.

“You think it’s fun living with a goddamned invalid?” Nina almost asked Estelle.
Goddamned invalid.
Her uncle Mort had called her father that the very day of Davy’s accident. But Nina knew that even though the words, ones she’d practiced, would do the trick—smash the love she didn’t deserve—she couldn’t bring herself to use them. Instead she said, “This isn’t working.”

“Really?” Estelle asked, startled. She took a step toward Nina, who, backing away, knocked over a chair.

“Why don’t you go back to bed?” she told Estelle, her tone of voice deliberately piqued and hostile. That she was good at this level of deception amazed her. She glanced dramatically at the ceiling as if seeing through it to the bedroom. “Why don’t you?” she repeated.

But Estelle was too stunned to move. She finally righted the chair that Nina had knocked over and dropped into it. Eventually Nina sat down too. They were silent, elbows on the table, for nearly an hour.

“Really?” Estelle said at last, her eyes hurt, her upper body slumped over the table.

“Really,” Nina answered, though this time she said the word quietly, even gently, her body aching and slumped, exactly like Estelle’s.

Three months after her breakup with Estelle, Nina went back to Connecticut. Her father was ill. Her mother had been trying to hide it from her but Nina had finally overheard him in the background of one of her weekly calls home. “Tell her I’m fine,” Leo had said to Vivie. “I’m coming home,” Nina responded into the phone.

It was during the second week of her stay in Middletown, when her father, recovered, was back at work, that Nina went to the Jewish cemetery to visit Davy’s grave. Early August, and three days of rain had given way at last to bouts of sunshine. Nina wore sunglasses and a silk scarf that Estelle had given her.

For a time she knelt by the grave, staring not so much at it as at the patch of grass at its base. Finally she reached for a stone and placed it on top of the grave, where several stones already lay. “I remember you,” she said as she released the stone.

She rose and walked several paces, but before she’d reached her car she stopped and returned to the grave, dropping again to her knees and staring again at the ground, then finally reaching for another stone to place atop the grave.

Four times Nina rose and returned, knelt, and found a stone, until finally she managed to leave the graveyard.

Five months later, her life in Berkeley busy but lonely, Nina forced herself to marry. The man’s name was Ed, which meant she didn’t have to explain to her mother anything about her change of circumstances during any of her weekly calls leading up to her marriage. The ceremony was a simple one before a local justice of the peace. Her parents, who had taken their first plane ride to be there, were better dressed than Nina and Ed. Vivie wore a blue suit that Bec had made for the occasion and a new pair of white gloves. Around Leo’s thin neck was a tie he’d acquired for the wedding, something just in at Leibritsky’s. But she and Ed just wore trousers and sweaters. “Is that what you’re wearing?” her mother asked, questioning her attire minutes before they left their apartment for the court. Nina nodded. “Good enough,” she said. This was January of 1957, a sunny weekday afternoon, but unusually cold.

She finished her dissertation the first year of her marriage, and by the next year she was an assistant professor at Berkeley. Estelle Casey had left to take a position in New York. Nina’s husband, Ed Glass, a mathematician, was also hired at Berkeley that same year. And so the two were busy—too busy, to Nina’s mind, to get bogged down in anything like the absence of true happiness, something she couldn’t feel with Ed, though he was a good man, just a little remote and as confounding to her as his theoretical work, which, despite the range of her learning and curiosity, she couldn’t bring herself to understand.

In the next years she and Ed had two children, Max and Russell, the first named in honor of her maternal grandfather, the second for her maternal grandmother, though naming a boy after a woman, she knew, was, in a traditional family like hers, risky stuff. Motherhood, though, was risky business altogether, a whole life suddenly and literally in her hands, and it was something Nina had never imagined until the babies were right there, one after the other, two chubby lumps of love who burped and spat and slept on her shoulder.

“It isn’t fair,” she once told Ed. They were standing in the doorway of their children’s bedroom, watching the boys sleep. Ed, whose life before Nina had been a bubble of pure mathematics, seemed as amazed as she was to have become a parent. He hadn’t so much pursued Nina as merely stood there while she’d hurled herself at him.

“What’s not fair?” he asked.

“This much luck,” she said, shaking her head.

But in fact the luck was tempered by many dreams of Estelle Casey and the less frequent but so much more violent Woodmont nightmare. For a time, then, she accepted it, this luck: motherhood, her fascinating growing boys, cooking and grocery shopping and cleaning for four, teaching and researching while all the rest was happening, Ed’s occasional suggestion that she lie on top of him, rather than the other way around, in an attempt at more satisfying sex—all that and the private anguish that caught up to her in her sleep.

The boys were four and six when, on a walk to their favorite park one June day, Nina saw the tall, slender figure of a woman approaching, one who, with her dark hair and colorful scarf, looked so very much like Estelle Casey. Nina gripped each boy’s hand and signaled to them to stop. She needed a rest, she explained, straining her eyes to better see the woman. It had been almost ten years since Nina had smashed her life with Estelle, and there were many times during those years that she considered attending one of the professional conferences at which she knew Estelle had become a favorite speaker. There, sitting anonymously in a crowded auditorium, she could look at her. That’s all she wanted to do, she told herself: look and look and look.

Max tugged at her arm. “Mommy, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Mommy’s seeing ghosts,” she answered, still scanning the distance. Then she bent toward Max’s questioning face. “Just kidding,” she said. She loosened her tight grip and the three commenced walking.

She sat on a park bench while the boys took to the swings. Nervously, she nibbled a cookie from the bag she’d brought for the boys’ treat. The woman was sitting not so far away on another park bench. Still, Nina couldn’t be sure if it was Estelle or not. It certainly looked like her, but did she really know what Estelle looked like anymore? she wondered. She wanted to approach, but she was afraid. “Really?” Estelle might say to Nina, her voice as shocked and pain-ridden as it had been that day when Nina broke up with her out of the blue.

The boys had joined some other children and a group of five was now running together in jagged spurts, like a school of fish. Only when one fell did the group stop, waiting until the child had successfully risen. Her younger boy, Russell, was the pack’s slowest.

What she would do, she decided, was make a slow circle around the park’s perimeter. At the closest corner this would bring her toward Estelle—if in fact it was Estelle—but not so close as to force an interaction. She could safely check the woman out.

It only took several steps to see that, yes, the woman was indeed Estelle Casey. Nina could identify her, despite the eyeglasses that Estelle had not worn before. She was reading. The children’s squeals, increasingly rambunctious, didn’t disturb her. Nina froze. Then she turned and began to retreat back to her bench. Then she froze again, torn between directions, the one toward Estelle and the one away from her, both of which she wanted to traverse at a run. In the middle of the playground Russell began to cry. And so it was in his direction that she finally rushed.

Nina was holding Russell in her arms, carrying him to the bench where she’d left the bag of cookies, when another woman approached Estelle. Nina watched as Estelle rose, opened her arms, and the two embraced. They did so just long enough and in such a way that Nina knew in an instant that this person was a lover, not a friend. Instinctively, Nina scanned the park, wondering if the other adults had noticed, but no one seemed to. Sensing that indifference, Nina shook her head. Never had she and Estelle dared to be as affectionate in public. Ten years, Nina told herself, and the world had changed in ways she had never dreamed of.

Oddly, she’d never imagined Estelle loving again. Instead she preferred to think she’d gone on to live a purely professional existence, as if in leaving her Nina had stolen Estelle’s very capacity for love.

Stupid, she saw now. And self-serving. For they go on, the betrayed do. She was witnessing it right then as the women pulled apart, laughed, kicked their legs out like kids, laughed some more.

They go on to better people.

Just the sight of Estelle Casey, all those years later, marked Nina. In the weeks that followed something came to the surface, a repressed feeling, the dread of not loving the best she could, of not being who she really was. She loved her children with all her heart, but she loved her partner in life, Ed Glass, like she would anything that familiar, a couch, a favorite movie, a vista she would be happy enough to see though she wouldn’t go out of her way to visit it.

I could die,
Nina told herself at last. Then she concluded, just as Bec had so many years before:
No, no. Am already dead.

That revelation came in July 1965, and in April of 1971 I saw Nina for the first time in fifteen years at Howard’s funeral. Not since her trip to Davy’s grave had she come back home. Nor had I, unlike Howard, ventured west. At thirty-eight she was still so pretty, but she looked pale and was ravaged with sorrow over Howard’s death. I was too. That he and I weren’t close in the last years didn’t make any difference. The grief was as raw and overwhelming as when Davy had died, and in a way the pain seemed to be about Davy all over again, as much as about Howard. When I told Nina that she nodded. “I see a connection between their deaths too,” she said. Then she took my hands in hers. “Come visit me, won’t you, Molly?” she asked.

A month later I traveled to Berkeley. There Nina lived in a small stucco house with her two boys, scientists in the making. By this time she’d been divorced for five years and she had a new lover, a woman named Sandra Pierce.

We were in her kitchen, painted the same pale green as the outside of her house. At the kitchen table we sipped coffee as Nina cautiously laid out the truth of her life for me. Staring more at the tabletop than at me, she blushed almost scarlet as she determinedly revealed herself, telling me first about Estelle, then Ed, and finally Sandra. She seemed compelled to do this telling, however uncomfortable it made her, or me. Other ways, other possibilities—I hadn’t really thought about that in terms of Nina’s sexuality, but there it was, made plain at last.

For a variety of reasons—maintaining custody of the kids being primary—she and Sandra didn’t live together, Nina explained. Besides, she added, that would be too much happiness. “Can’t have that,” she said. “Makes me crazy.”

“Too much happiness?” I asked, referring to the distance she purposefully kept from her lover, who lived only blocks away. “Would Davy really want you to be deprived?”

“You’re not telling me anything my analyst hasn’t told me for the last six years, Molly,” she said.

My marriage to Mark Fishbaum had gone south just when Nina’s had with Ed, and we talked about that, too. My situation was easy enough to explain. I hadn’t really loved Mark, I told Nina. Over time I realized that he’d just filled a hole in my life, the one created not only by Davy’s death but also by everyone scattering in its aftermath. I wanted more from a relationship than just that. Being an only child, Mark had always wanted children, but I kept delaying, and in our fifth year I lied to him, telling him that I didn’t want children and had never wanted children, thinking he might take that and leave. “Bingo,” I said, and sighed.

Nina placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Molly,” she said.

That was how our visit began—the catching up, the confessions of our confused adult lives—but we got busy soon enough. Each day Nina had a class to prepare for and teach, and meetings with students beyond that. Max and Russell, then eleven and nine, needed to be taken care of too. She was glad, she told me, for the extra help, and the third day of my visit, while I made toast and eggs for breakfast, there was a moment when Nina and I looked at each other, recognized our mothers in ourselves, and suddenly whooped with a kind of laughter reminiscent of theirs.

“I
get
it,” Nina said, speaking of my mother’s mood, which invariably lifted each summer in the company of her sisters.

“I get it too,” I told Nina, speaking of Vivie, spatula held high, delighting, as I was just then, in feeding a whole clan. And a moment later, when Russell hopped onto my lap, I got it even more, though this time it was Bec’s journey I’d segued into, the piece of it about not becoming a mother, and of how lovely it was—a holy moment—sitting there and holding a child.

Because of Nina’s unyielding schedule I had toured the Bay Area largely on my own for the first days of my weeklong visit, but on Thursday I went with Nina to the Berkeley campus. The class she taught that day wowed her students. If the entire evolution of life—Big Bang to now—was likened to a single year, she explained to a packed auditorium, then mankind’s appearance comes at about one thirty p.m. on December 31. At 11:59:59, the Renaissance begins. And with less than a second to go, everything else—the Enlightenment, modernity, life as we actually know it. “Feeling insignificant yet?” Nina quipped, and the class howled. I got the shivers.

When we left the auditorium a group of five students followed us, each one pushing past the next, seeking an appointment with Nina. She had no openings that week, she explained, but then she met with two of them on the spot anyway. I waited over an hour in the hallway.