The Red Book (21 page)

“You want some water?” Clover asks, thirsty on the one hand, worried on the other that if she stands there one more second she will confess last night’s indiscretion. Everyone always ends up spilling their darkest secrets to Jane, even politicians who should know better. Clover can’t figure out whether it’s Jane’s guilelessness, the tragedies of her past, or the pure, undistracted manner in which she sits still and leans in to listen. Whatever its roots, Jane’s seemingly endless reserves of patience have made her an excellent journalist and an even better friend. Maybe she should just tell her. It’s killing her not to confess.

“Yeah, sure, a water would be great,” says Jane. “Oh, and if you happen to see one? A Popsicle for Sophie. She likes red and orange. Purple will do in a pinch. But no green. She doesn’t do green.”

“Got it. Water for you, Popsicle for Soph, no green. I’ll be right back.” On her way to the food tables, she nearly bumps into Gunner, who’s clutching a copy of
Moby Dick
as if it were a lifeboat. “Gunner!” she says. “What’s shaking?” but either he doesn’t hear her or he’s too lost in a tunnel of his own thoughts to register the sound of his name. Huh, thinks Clover. That’s weird. She could have sworn she’d seen tears in his eyes.

Something’s going on between Addison and him, no question. Anger visibly, if silently, pinballs between them. And poor Trilby has no elasticity left in her bumper to deflect it.

Back at the moon bounce, Jane hears, “Jane? Jane Streeter?” and turns to face a once-pretty but now somewhat weather-beaten brunette with a name tag bearing a moniker she only vaguely recognizes. “Ellen Grandy. We were in that Stanley Cavell class together?” Ellen Grandy, Jane deduces, must have a child on the moon bounce as well because she’s unable to focus on Jane’s face without doing that back-and-forth eye twitch endemic to all women whose attention is torn between the exchange of adult information and the overseeing of a child’s safety and welfare.

“Oh, right, the comedies of remarriage,” Jane says, surprised at how quickly she pulled that ace out of the hole while Ellen Grandy, standing before her in the flesh, triggers not a single retrievable memory. Then again, Cavell’s class had been memorable. Probably her favorite of all the classes she’d ever taken at Harvard. They’d spent the whole semester studying black-and-white films from the late 1930s and early 1940s and reading relevant selections from Kant and Wittgenstein on the subject of happiness, filial and otherwise.

Kant (with whom Jane felt an instantaneous and long-lasting affinity) believed in complete moral virtue as a prerequisite to happiness, while undercutting his own argument by acknowledging that not only are human beings incapable of being wholly virtuous but that, oftentimes, virtue might even stand in the way of happiness. Wittgenstein was more concerned with the impossibility of defining the word
happiness
in a subjective world while experiencing it in a temporal one. The only person who can be truly happy, Wittgenstein felt, is the one able to live solely in the present moment, for time—memory of the past, anticipation of the future, therefore death—is happy’s enemy.

“I loved that class,” says Jane, catching another glimpse of ecstatically bouncing Sophie, wondering whether, outside the boundaries of moon bounces and sex, people are ever capable of living solely in the moment. It occurs to her, in ironic Wittgensteinian retrospect, how happy hearing those lectures and pondering life’s questions had once made her. Maybe not as happy as the moon bounce makes Sophie, but happy enough to identify it.

“Yeah, me, too,” says Ellen. “Loved it. One of my favorite classes ever.”

“It was so . . .” Jane, whose words usually never fail her, can’t produce a nonclichéd adjective.
Relevant
pops into her head, but she realizes it’s only her present-day self who feels this way.

“Interesting,” Ellen says, filling in the blank adequately, if meaninglessly. She waves to the moon bounce. “Over here, Nell! Mommy’s right here.” A striking dark-haired girl, who looks to be around Sophie’s age, jumps and waves. Now she and Sophie are holding hands and jumping together, fast friends. “I mean, I just loved how all those couples had to get divorced so they could mess around on the side without audiences rioting. So last century, right?”

“I’m sorry?” Jane’s memories of the precise details of each remarriage are fuzzy.

“Remember? I think it was like illegal or something back then to make a film depicting adultery. So they got around it by having the couple officially broken up or divorced or whatever.”

“Oh, right,” Jane says, but either she’d completely blocked out that part or she’d been sick on that day. She makes a mental note to dig up her notes. They must be somewhere in that mess in the attic in Belmont, not far from her mother’s Dear John letter to Lodge Waldman.

“Such a nice day today,” says Ellen. “We really got lucky. Can you imagine if we’d been here last weekend during the monsoon?”

“I know, right?” says Jane, using a newish-sounding phrase she’d heard Addison’s daughter Trilby use a bunch of times that morning, hoping English-speaking American adults now use it as well. After an awkward pause, during which Jane gives Ellen Grandy adequate mental and physical space to take her leave, should she so desire, Jane takes a stab at small talk. “So what do you do? I mean when you’re not watching your kid jump up and down on a moon bounce.”

Ellen smiles. “I treat all those kids who bump into one another jumping up and down on moon bounces.”

“Emergency room doctor?”

“Pediatrician.”

“Oh, cool. My father was a doctor. And please don’t tell me how many kids hurt themselves on these things every year. I don’t want to know. Okay, fine. I do want to know. How many?”

“Let’s just say fewer than you might think and more than you would like and leave it at that,” says Ellen. “I mean, what are you going to do? Forbid them from
that
?” She gestures to the colorful inflated structure. “Sometimes, in the name of fun, you just have to throw caution to the wind.”

“Absolutely,” says Jane, wishing she could incorporate such a seemingly simple hypothesis into her daily life, which has, of late, been anything but fun. How strange that she’s always been able to throw caution to the wind when it comes to work but hardly ever when it comes to play. It’s as if she can’t allow herself the joy of . . . joy. For fear of losing it.

“You write for the
Globe
, right? I read your stuff all the time.”

“That makes you and three others,” says Jane.

“Oh, come on. I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. Apparently nobody’s interested in foreign news stories anymore. I mean, except for you. And those three others, though by now we’ve probably already lost them to Drudge.” She’s enjoying chitchatting with Ellen Grandy, despite herself.

“Well, I guess it’s not actually fair to use me as a litmus test. I’m not your average foreign news reader. I spent years with Médecins Sans Frontières before opening my practice,” says Ellen. “So, you know—”

“You’re kidding me!” says Jane, now feeling that frisson of instant affinity she feels whenever her path crosses with others who’ve seen, up close, the grisly results of mixing politics with gunpowder. She’s reminded, as she so often is, that one can never judge a book by its cover. By the look of Ellen Grandy—the sensible leather flats, the headband—she’d pegged her as more conventional. “Where were you based?”

“Um, well, I was in Sarajevo in the early nineties, and then I did a few years in the Congo and Liberia, and then my last posting, before I had Nell and started doing more administrative stuff in the Paris bureau, was in Afghanistan.”

“No way! Which part?”

Here Ellen Grandy seems to hesitate. “Um, Jalalabad?” Her cheeks redden.

“Oh my God! Did you ever meet my husband, Hervé? Dirty blond hair, about six foot one, reddish beard when he grew it in?”

Ellen’s lips disappear between her teeth, and she scrunches her eyebrows, as if trying to conjure his face. “I don’t
think
so—”

“He was back and forth to Jalalabad, oh, at least a half a dozen times. Wrote for
Libé
? I mean,
Libération
.” She pronounces the whole word, remembering that Americans usually have no conception of the French press aside from
Le Monde
and
Paris Match
. “Wait, when did you say you were there?”

“I moved there in 1998 and stayed until ’02.”

“And you never met Hervé? That seems almost impossible. I’m sure he told me he stayed in that clinic several times during that period, unless there were two clinics or something, or I’m wrong, and it was Médecins du Monde, but I’m sure he said MSF. I know it. He even joked that it was the only three-star hotel in the Hindu Kush. The MSF Hindu Kush.”

Ellen smiles. “Oh, wait, was his last name Duclos? Hervé Duclos?” she says, but without nearly the same level of enthusiasm at the found coincidence as Jane.

“Yes! He was my husband! Holy shit, I knew you had to have met him. That’s so crazy, isn’t it?”

“Definitely. I mean, I remember him. Sure. Nice guy, as I recall. Tall . . .” Her voice trails off. “I was so sorry to hear what happened to him, Jane. I mean, I heard about it back then, and then I read your entry in the red book, which, wow, I thought was really beautiful. You really have a way with words.”

“Thanks. I mean, oh my God, I can’t believe you knew Hervé—” Now Jane is confused. If Ellen had read her red book entry, and she knew Hervé, and she knew the two of them had been married, then why make her jump through all those conversational hoops? She chalks it up to yet another one of those weird things people do when dealing with the bereaved.

“And your mother?” says Ellen. “You wrote about her illness. Is she still . . . ?”

“No. She died this past winter. But—”

“Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry. I lost my mother a few years ago. Also to cancer. It’s such a blow, isn’t it? Even when you have all that time to prepare. Especially when you have all that time to prepare. I mean, I always wonder what’s worse, instant death or that long, drawn-out battle.”

“I guess they both have their advantages and disadvantages,” says Jane, as if they were discussing the choice of one ice cream flavor over another, rather than the deaths of two of the people she loved most in the world. “But—” She’s dying to return to the topic of Hervé, to reminisce with someone who knew him in his natural habitat. Why did Ellen let that strand of the conversation drop? Is she worried about upsetting her? If so, Jane thinks, she should figure out a way to let Ellen know it’s okay to talk about her dead husband. She
wants
to talk about her dead husband.

“Stand up, sweetie!” Ellen has now essentially turned her back on Jane and is focused intently on the mouth of the moon bounce, watching Nell being somewhat trampled by the bigger kids. “Just push him off of you. You can do it. I know you can.” Now she addresses Jane with a slight turn of her left cheek, still keeping her gaze firmly on her daughter. “It’s so hard to know when to say something and when not.”

Was that an opening? Jane wonders. Or just a stock commentary on parenting?
Say something!
Jane wants to shout. Instead, in a mangled attempt to repeat Trilby’s throwaway response—“I know, right?”—she says, “I know, all right.”

Now Ellen turns to face her, biting her bottom lip with what looks like enough force to draw blood. “You
do
? So Hervé
told
you? Oh my God, why didn’t you just say so? I mean, I know I haven’t been exactly forthcoming here either, but Jesus, what a relief! I had no idea! I mean, I guess I was just assuming he would never say a word—”

“Ellen. I’m sorry, what are you talking about?”

“But . . . I thought you just said you knew. Isn’t that what you just said? ‘I know, all right’?”

“I meant to say, ‘I know, right.’ Isn’t that the expression the kids use these days? ‘I know . . . right?’ ”

“Oh shit,” says Ellen. “I’m sorry. I thought—”

Jane can feel her heart racing, her mind rapidly tying loose strings and fragments together. All those trips Hervé took to Jalalabad. Even when the world’s attention had moved elsewhere. With a burst of fury that surprises her, her hands adamantly on her waist, she says, “
You thought what?
”

“Nothing.” Ellen is fighting hard to keep her expression in shut-down mode, but her quivering bottom lip refuses to yield. “Forget I even said anything.”

Sophie and Nell erupt from the moon bounce, tumbling out of its yellow and red mouth hand in hand, overflowing with ecstasy and exclamation: “That was so fun!”; “Let’s do it again!”; “Did you see me do a somersault?”; “It made my tummy feel funny!”

Jane scans Nell’s exotic, almost Asian-looking face for any trace of Hervé and sees none, thank God, although at this point, nothing would surprise her. “Mom!” says Nell. “This is my new best friend. Sophie! Can we go on again?”

Before Ellen has a chance to answer, Jane shouts “No!” and yanks Sophie’s hand away from Nell’s with such force that her daughter starts crying. Nell runs to the safety of Ellen’s arms. Jane’s not sure where to throw the flaming arrow of her anger, at Ellen, Hervé, or at her own willful naïveté. The only thing she knows for certain is that if she stands in that spot next to the moon bounce
one more second
she will start hurling epithets in front of both Nell and Sophie.

She sweeps Sophie up into her arms and runs to the edge of Soldiers Field, her brain exploding with ghosts and smoke. A doctor once warned her, back when a four-year-old Sophie was admitted to the hospital with meningitis just as Jane was stricken with heart palpitations so severe she thought the two of them would be dead by morning, that PTSD can be triggered by anything traumatic—not just war’s violence but also a critically ill child, bad news, the death of a loved one—but she refused to acknowledge that her heart and mind were in any way connected.
“Je n’ai pas le syndrome de stress post-traumatique!”
—“I do not have post-traumatic stress!”—she shouted at the physician on call that weekend, gripping her chest, certain she was having a heart attack, even after her echocardiogram and EKG came back normal.