Double Happiness (10 page)

Her hair sprouted in tufts around her face. She pulled my father's fingers from his eyes. His hands were the best part of him. She held them like eggs, very still between her own. My father's face smoothed to a wet red calmness. My mother called him sweet George over and over, which is not his name, not a name I'd ever heard before. Their foreheads touched—she leaning in from her seat on the bidet, he from the lip of the tub. Their bodies made an imperfect arch. I backed out, feeling nauseous, the nausea my mother might have felt when first carrying me. I passed my own bathroom with the green ivy paper climbing to the ceiling, all the way up and across the ceiling, and I passed on the opportunity to suffer my own hand reaching into my throat. I dressed for school. On the way out I wrote a brief note and stuffed it into the pocket of the folded, sleeping Dr. Ovita. I'm coming with you, I wrote.

And Dr. Ovita agreed. My parents said okay, I could go to school in Israel, learn another language. But school is not a big deal to me. In summers I help pitch tents for the surgeons, and I am never afraid. In winter I come to this kibbutz, where I am famous for my cooking and have a soldier-lover with hands that feel like tiny rabbits hopping all over me while I laugh. My
hair is very long. I wear a bra as soft as a blanket. My lover speaks to my breast in Hebrew. His guttural sound will surely raise it from the dead. And when I write my parents, my father signs each reply: Our love.

P
ATTY PROMISED HER OLD FRIEND
C
OREN THAT SHE HAD
the very best cure for heartache: the shrewd and pitiless French. Brown empty fields late autumn. The view from her stone veranda. Just pack your bags, Patty said. Bring nothing as a gift or I'll turn you away at the door.

For many years, before Patty left for the Dordogne, she and Coren were neighbors on East Ninetieth Street. Patty with three bedrooms and a full dining room on the courtyard side. Coren, only one bedroom plus den, plus a terrace with clear all-season views over low rooftops to the tallest trees of Central Park. On her terrace, Coren tended tulips in pots in the springtime and, in the fall, packed dense gray lavender into copper urns. Fussy, Patty said to her husband, safely. He repeated nothing and Patty hoped she was a loyal friend.

Loyal, but not by nature, she knew. She'd learned the long hard way her own need for discretion and granted it when she could. Patty's son had been trouble every day of his young life
until an interest in other planets saved him. Discovered completely by accident on his way out of a third college—this one in Florida. An observatory built to please a new president perched on an inlet. Erupting, volatile stars viewed up close through the telescope could be seen reflected on ripple waves like tiny lit matches. He took up astronomy, and now lived north of Vancouver.

But the years between his birth and his discovery had been challenging and lonely. Patty sometimes felt the company of friends with advancing, adorable children impossible. But what little Coren knew to ask about a child's progress was so far from the rub of daily life it didn't matter. So Patty sat on Coren's tiny terrace in the warm months and drank coffee, wine, and champagne. She ate chocolate, the best bread, sometimes fish, sometimes cheese. In the winter, things were busy from November until March. Then one morning Patty would call Coren and announce with a laugh that the seasons had changed. They'd put on parkas over robes and slippers and go out again with hot mugs to view the first yellow-green tips nudging out of the potting mix.

Coren rarely asked about Patty's husband Brad in all their years together. It was as if she'd never heard of marital discord, and offering gravlax on bitter crackers, or chutney that scorched the tongue, she didn't much chime to Patty's hints. Coren
liked
Patty's husband. And this complete lack of discernment was
so calming, Patty decided, as a joke, to take it as a lesson. She'd stop trying to jar him into her own near constant alarm. She would
appreciate
his buffered concentration. He liked his work, the rest he took as it came. He never suffered much. She could admire that. But when he died, stepping out into traffic, listening on his phone to his secretary—who reported tearfully from the podium at his memorial the final crackle and disconnect— Patty's strongest and strangest prevailing feeling was that he'd gotten off easy.

Their son, Brad Jr., was shattered, quietly. He put his head down all the way to his knees and his shoulders shook like a duck in water shaking hind feathers. A surprising tremble along the navy wool of his father's blazer, his narrow back, nipped like a mannequin's at the waist. Darling, she whispered. Brad, sweetheart, and placed her own shaking hand between his shoulder blades. The cool of his skin seemed to penetrate the wool and seep into her fingers. He was very high, she decided, yes, and these shaking tears were no more than an earnest need to be elsewhere. She gave him five hundred dollars when she put him on the plane, and the promise of some kind of trust when things were settled. She went home to dismantle her life.

It was easier than she ever could have imagined. Coren wasn't useful at all. Patty would collapse nightly into one of her silly Adirondack chairs and over the flicker of netted candles report on the chicanery of auction houses and international realtors and estate attorneys. Coren would nod and pour. Only much
later, when the walnut trees planted her very first spring in the Dordogne were finally bearing, did Patty realize what a comfort that had been.

Her helpful new neighbor, a farmer who wished to graze his cows in her meadow, brought two dozen saplings and planted each in a delicate line out to the east of her widow's perch. Three years passed, then his sons came to gather the first harvest, and Patty saw an opportunity. She'd return a kindness and maybe settle a ticking disquiet. Almost a fizzy feeling in her nervous system. She wrote to Coren, Come, my dear friend, this place was made for you. It will cure you.

When she didn't receive an answer she telephoned. But even long distance, Coren could be obtuse, a bit dense. What exactly did Patty wish to cure?

Patty laughed, then said, Look, something's come up.

Are you all right? Is Brad okay?

I can't really talk about it on the telephone.

It was odd to think that Coren grew up in Europe because she got so thoroughly lost on the way to the Dordogne. She was stranded a whole long dull day in Amsterdam, where, she told Patty, she'd actually considered calling her mother. As a surprise. Could Patty believe it? I mean everything was completely different, and still I wanted to find a pay phone—there are none—and call and say, I'm home.

You have a home wherever I am, dear, just try to get here. This was the inflated sentiment Patty used all the time, and it protected her. She'd heard the story of Coren's mother long ago. And it was certainly sad. And Coren had been very young. And the stepmother she gained too fast had been feckless and hurtful. All of that, and then the refrain about a phone booth, the most unfortunate detail about her mother's death. Patty felt it was almost tasteless for Coren to bring it up, even obliquely. But this was Coren trying to seed some kind of emotional ground. This would be the trouble: her husband Phil's desertion—it had finally come to that, Patty heard—would equal her mother's early death. Well, Patty had already decided she owed her. That's what she'd realized watching her neighbor's sons bent and laughing, collecting tiny fallen nuts in her young grove. Also that she did precious little in the way of aid and comfort, and maybe it was time.

But willing and able are sometimes very far apart, Patty understood. This case, she could see immediately, was complicated. She watched through the Plexiglas wall in the tiny airport in Bordeaux as Coren shuffled past a customs officer, only to be waved back, then dragged back by a sleeve. His face amused and regretful. His lips quite red and curled. Patty knew the addled woman in gray would be tossed about between bored officers, perhaps even mocked and imitated. She tapped sharp
nails against the glass. She caught his startled attention and smiled. This was the right place for her. She knew the right smiles, could calibrate a swift disarming promise. Such a different world and she may have been happier here all along. She was happy now, catching and holding a quick high strike in the eye of a pretty young man. He waved away the woman in gray and smiled an answer to Patty, a promise neither would remember a moment later.

Patty always liked that easy way of playing with things, of lighting small tips of desire and turning away. Just fun. And her husband had never minded, never much noticed. Here it was more intricate, more competitive! And that left her always assessing, sizing up. The doors slid apart, and Coren reached around for a too-short handle to drag a thin red suitcase. She wore a sheath cut like a muumuu, an embarrassing hand-knit sweater, and a nice pair of boots, as if she'd robbed a chicer, cleverer woman. Their burnished coppery sheen looked out of place with the fade of her dress and skin and hair. First thing, Patty would release some closely held information about grooming in one's fifties. Though actually, now that she thought about it, and she had plenty of time, as Coren seemed to lose her way between the automatic doors and the rope fence—Patty's fresh cut roses drooped in her hand —Coren was ten years younger, at least. Not possible, she thought, What in the world had happened? And then she remembered
her mission. Aid and comfort, aid and comfort, nothing more. Coren! she cried out, Thank god.

Patty warned Coren about sleeping too long, but it was little use. Coren poured herself into the guest bed and refused, in a complimentary way, to come down for dinner. Such a perfect bed she couldn't move, though Patty's roasting chicken was in all her dreams, the aroma divine. But at five in the morning, Patty woke to the bang of Coren in the kitchen, smashing against the chair rungs. Let her wander, Patty thought, not unkindly; she knew Coren would be happier for the moment on her own. She'd take her in hand in the morning.

Out the high window a sliver of red warmed the black edge of the hill beyond the walnut trees. Patty listened to the knock of the kettle hitting the stove top, and remembered the sad thickness of this landscape when she'd first arrived, before she'd adjusted, and wondered how Coren would see it. But Coren saw so little. It was the secret of her startling equanimity. Patty pulled the duvet high on her chest to smother a prick of unhappiness. A cat, the old gray mother, sighed and settled at her knees.

Their last sleepover, Patty now remembered, had been a disaster. A brownout in Manhattan, both husbands out of town, they'd watched the undulating city from Coren's terrace. The darkness, the sounds from the streets, frightening,
but from their perch of safety, fascinating, too. That's when she'd heard the tale of Coren's mother's death and the part darkness played in the violent end of a young foolish woman. Coren's mother had made her fatal telephone call from a booth with a burnt-out bulb. Surely the first thing a girl learns is to avoid the dark alone. Patty released the thought and let sleep take her over.

Patty had a theory about sad stories, they were best left untold. Or told only once if absolutely necessary, then forgotten. So on the first day, spotting Coren wrapped in a blanket staring out unseeing from the stone veranda, she settled on an agenda of distraction. Not easily done in a place where culture had yet to recover from a war most of the world knew only as a reliable movie plot. But there were country walks to be taken, and morning markets to be shopped; she'd invite friends, foreigners who, like herself, had bought up the crumbling abandoned farmhouses and poured money, like honey, into the restorations.

And lucky for both of them, she'd just received a knotty, mysterious letter from Brad Jr. in Vancouver. Darling, she said, letting the letter flutter from her right hand as she balanced a tray with toast and jam and fresh coffee. Help me sort this out, please! She settled the tray on the stone wall and offered Coren a pretty napkin and one of the small white porcelain plates that pleased her so. Good news? asked Coren.

Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. And they both laughed.

Brad's trust was nothing he could live on, but it broke the spirit to have things too easy when young. Didn't Coren agree?

Well, what does he say?

Here goes:
Dear Mama
—great, so far, said Patty, looking up, smiling—
I don't want to bother you because I know you've had a hard time. The project of the house is more than just old stones. If you could be with Dad, you wouldn't need to be out in a field clearing rocks. Right?

Good luck with the harvest! Be careful of your back. Walnuts are small, but weight is strange the way it accumulates. Maybe that's more about stars
.

Anyway, things are pretty good at the Pilner-Stokes, better than at Kaplan-Kolp. The funding tanked when the newest council convened to “clean-up” fiscal slag. Our salaries were cut 10 percent. Unbelievable. But the universe is a long-term project. Anyway, do you think I could talk to Preston Boll about a bigger payout from the trust? Then I could move out of the cave with hot plate, to a studio with a stove and, you know, a shower. I love the work and wish it would pay more. I don't know. Maybe we're both just looking for signs of Dad in something totally mysterious and out there. Anyway, would you consider an increase? If it's a problem, forget it. But if you say yes, you know I'll repay you
.

Your son, Brad

Patty folded the letter back into its blue envelope, lifted her cup, and blew on her hot coffee, took a tentative sip.

Very Brad, said Coren. Always so tender. Just like his father.

You think so?

I do! You know what I was remembering in the airport? The way he used to sit with Jorge in the doorman's booth and play gin rummy on rainy afternoons. Poor sad Jorge, remember? His cheeks would swell and that stood for a smile. I remembered the two of them, Brad, a neat stack of pennies—