The World Without You (35 page)

“I drove up here,” he says. “I hope that’s all right.”

“All right?” She steps back from him as if to get a better look, to make sure he is who is and not some impostor boyfriend.

“You told me not to come, Lily. You said you wanted to do this on your own.”

“Oh, Malcolm.” She takes him in a hug.

Now that the service is over, she leads him down the stairs and out behind the Community Center, past the playground and the tennis courts and across the open field, where, looking back at the balcony, she sees the memorial guests shrinking in the distance, appearing now like marbles in slots. She subsides onto the grass; Malcolm sits down next to her. “Malcolm, you’re here!”

“I’m here,” he says.

“Tell me all about you.”

He laughs.

“Come on, catch me up.”

He’s wearing a seersucker suit, the pants of which he’s gotten grass stains on, but he doesn’t seem to care, and she certainly doesn’t care about her own grass stains. She takes off her shoes and runs her toes across the ground.

“I went to the beach,” he says.

She pokes him in the side. “I know you went to the beach.”

“What else can I tell you?”

“Whatever you want.”

“That guy I met with the other day? The financier, as you call him?”

“What financier?”

“Come on, Lily. Have you forgotten? I’ve been meeting with backers? Trying to open up my own restaurant?”

She remembers, of course. She just forgot Malcolm met with a backer the other day. Although now that he mentions it, she recalls a toe against her calf as she lay half asleep, the strong, animal tug of him and, some minutes later, a hand gentle on her neck when he emerged wet from the shower, the smell of coffee as he leaned over in the smear of dawn to kiss her goodbye, his words,
Wish me good luck
.

“Well, he called me this morning and said there’s a good chance he’ll fund my restaurant.”

“Malcolm! That’s amazing!”

“A good chance,” he repeats. “The details still need to be worked out.”

“Malcolm!”

“Lily, nothing’s definite.”

Nothing’s ever definite, she wants to tell him. Look where she’s been these past few hours. Look where she’s been the last year of her life. “Master of your domain,” she says. “Emperor of your empire.”

“Lily, come on.”

“Malcolm, you’re going to have your own restaurant!” She takes his hand and they return across the field, back to the crowd sipping drinks and eating canapés, back to where her parents are waiting for her.

Now that the service is over, Thisbe greets people she hasn’t seen since Leo’s funeral, some she hasn’t seen since their wedding, only now she’s gotten the two mixed up and she can’t remember whom she saw when.

She finds Calder down in the game room, where he’s playing foosball against himself, twisting the handles around and around so that the players keep doing somersaults. He stands beside the woman who brought him downstairs.

“Thank you for rescuing him,” Thisbe says. “And me, too, while you were at it.”

“It was nothing. I got him away from the madding crowd. It was the least I could do.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Hello there.” Jules has sneaked up from behind Thisbe and is standing next to her now.

“Jules!” she says, hugging him. “I hadn’t even realized you were coming, and then I saw you in the crowd!”

“Oh, come on,” he says. “I never would have missed this.”

Thisbe tries to introduce Calder to Jules (“Jules was Daddy’s best friend”), but Calder doesn’t even look up from his foosball game, whose players he continues to spin and spin without regard for their kicking the ball.

Thisbe steps back to have a look at Jules. His hair is blond as it always was, but he has cut it short, and it’s starting to grow gray at the temples. “How are you, Jules?”

“I’m okay, I guess. It’s been a tough year.”

“For all of us.”

“I mean, I knew that guy when we were in first grade.”

“He lived for you,” she says. “He lived for all his friends in Lenox.” She points at his feet. “Look at you, Jules. Your shoelaces are untied.” And she remembers how Jules could never be bothered to tie his shoelaces, and how Leo made a point of stepping on them. She imagines Jules as a boy, imagines Leo as well, giving each other noogies and dead arms, kneeing each other in the thigh, shouting “Charlie Horse!” as they did so, as if by naming the act they were absolved of blame. All that sanctioned violence decked out as camaraderie so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. And an image comes to her, of Leo and Jules in the mall on some bank of escalators, running up the down escalators and down the up ones, nearly colliding with the other shoppers. It’s as if the memory comes from earlier, and she’s been boomeranged back to when she wasn’t around, trespassing on their former lives.

The summer she met Leo, Jules was still trying to get into movies for half price. At the local diner, where he and Leo would convene for a noontime breakfast, Jules would flirt with the waitress by insisting on ordering the kids’ meal. “More fish sticks,” he said. “And chocolate milk. And could you possibly get me a box of crayons?” They acted like children when they were together, probably because they’d met when they were six, a group of boys who spent the summer with each other, all of them parting ways when the school year started and reuniting like sparrows every July, claiming that school, their friends back home, meant nothing to them and they lived only for the summer and for each other, when they would return to Lenox. In Leo’s case, it was true. He spoke of his friends from Lenox with near-reverence, no one more so than Jules, who lived the rest of the year in the suburbs of Boston and who would remain Leo’s best friend until he died. It was all guys—five, six, seven of them—and even once they were older and had left for college, it seemed there was no room for girls. Early on, Thisbe discovered that by dating Leo she was also dating his group of friends and she was supposed to win their favor. But she didn’t want to appeal to her boyfriend’s buddies, some of whom she liked and some of whom she didn’t. As it happened, they all liked her. She’s always been good at being one of the boys, and she was especially fond of Jules.

Now Calder has lain down on the floor beside them; it seems that he’s actually fallen asleep.

“He has your eyes,” Jules says.

“Jules, he’s sleeping.”

“Your eyelids.”

“You sound just like Leo.” That night at the bar, the first time they met, Leo sidled over to her by the nachos and beer and said, “I like your eyes.”

Thisbe laughed. He would need to think of a better come-on than that. “How about my nose?”

“That’s good, too.”

“And my ears?”

“I like those also.”

“Seriously,” Jules says. “He’s your spitting image.”

“It’s funny,” she says, “because I’ve always thought he looked like Leo.” Though in a way she and Leo looked alike.

“Tell me about him.”

“He’s your typical three-year-old,” she says. “He’s the king of scatology. Everything’s a poop joke with him.”

“Tell me something else.”

“He’s just like Leo. He has absolutely no sense of direction. One time, I took him to a party with my anthropologist friends and he kept bumping into the mirrors. Everyone thought he was drunk.”

Now Marilyn tells the crowd it’s time for the unveiling, and Thisbe thinks this is a reprise. Because it was only a year ago when she was here, sitting up front at Leo’s funeral, then on to the graveyard, the limousines flashing their garish lights. And everything she’s been feeling these last minutes, that sense of solace, of things opening up, back with Jules again, even laughing a little: it’s all gone now, and a gloom settles over her once more.

She drives with Marilyn in her rental car, and she feels that she can’t look at her and can’t avoid her either. They’re two chickens in a coop, and she stares straight ahead, navigating along the twisting roads, and the word comes to her,
serpentine, serpentine
, as if someone is shooting at her.

A car horn Dopplers in the distance. A cow looks up from the side of the road, blank-faced, cow-faced, chewing its cud.

Now all that’s left is the laying of the headstone, which the graveyard workers do without ceremony, and it seems no one in the family wants ceremony, either. There it is, removed from its wrapping, unveiled to them, Thisbe thinks, and of course it is; that’s why they call it an unveiling.

LEO
FRANKEL
,
HUSBAND
,
FATHER
,
BROTHER
,
SON

APRIL
10, 1972–
JULY
4, 2004

“We forgot to say kaddish,” someone says. Amram was supposed to say kaddish at the memorial, but he wasn’t there. There are thirty, forty people standing around Leo’s grave, more than half of them Jewish, but no one besides Noelle knows how to say kaddish. Lily says, “Will you say kaddish, Noelle?”

Noelle has never said kaddish before; even during Leo’s shivah, Amram recited it for her. There has been a movement among the Orthodox to allow women to say kaddish, but Noelle isn’t part of that movement. Even before she became religious, she wasn’t a feminist, yet she feels like a crypto-feminist as she realizes that were she to say kaddish she’d probably stumble over the words. She speaks and reads Hebrew as well as Amram does, but she has never been called on to lead the prayer service. As she stands before the crowd, she’s surprised to feel she’s been kept under wraps.

She does, in fact, falter as she begins, especially since she’s reciting from memory. And the kaddish is in Aramaic, the language of the Talmud, which she never studied. But she presses on, reminding herself that it doesn’t matter if she makes a mistake because no one will know besides her. For a second she feels loosed from something, and when she thinks that Amram may not be coming back, it’s with less panic than she felt earlier. If she has to, she’ll take the boys back to Israel on her own. She’ll find a way to manage.

When she finishes chanting, everyone stands quietly in the graveyard, waiting for what comes next. But there’s nothing more to do. So they form a single line moving away from the grave, and one by one they get into their cars.

13

Thisbe drives home with Marilyn and Calder, none of them speaking; a heaviness corrodes the air. They move along Main Street, slowed by the holiday traffic, and when Thisbe turns on the radio no sound comes in.

They get to the house, and Marilyn goes upstairs and Thisbe and Calder go downstairs, and soon the other cars have arrived as well and everyone disperses to their quarters. The house feels empty, yet it’s overcome at the same time by a low-grade clamor. Thisbe thinks she hears noise upstairs, but when she goes to search she can’t find anyone.

In the garden, the sprinklers have gone off of their accord, and now, on the second floor, a bath is being run. The whole house is leaking water. In the living room, she finds the TV on, but no one is watching it. The news is playing: a pastiche of the holiday. Fireworks are being readied by the National Parks Service. A man is stoking a barbecue pit. President Bush is presiding over a service at Arlington National Cemetery.

Outside on the porch her nephews are spraying each other with Calamine lotion. Now it’s sunscreen they’re spraying. Soon Calder has joined the fray.

When he comes back inside, he looks like a ghost. A pink ghost, actually. Thisbe didn’t realize they’d invented pink sunscreen. Or maybe it’s pink Calamine lotion. Whatever it is, he’s covered with it.

She takes him into the bathroom and cleans him up, and now, back in the basement they’ve been sharing, wearing a new set of clothes, he sits down to the computer. She has told him he can compose an e-mail, but since he’s only three, he simply pounds on the keys. Seated on the bed with the screen open before him, he regards her computer with a glum familiarity that suggests he’s been composing e-mails for years. When he was two, he insisted on having his own cell phone, so she gave him a phone that no longer worked. But he wanted an actual phone, something that lit up and made real cell phone noises. Now he wants his own laptop. Like most children, he loves buttons—what, Thisbe wonders, did the cavemen do?—but he seems especially preoccupied with them. This disappoints her—she wanted to raise a humanist!—though she takes solace in the thought that it will be good to have a handyman around the house.

She connects him to the Internet and goes upstairs, and when she reaches the landing she sees Noelle in the foyer putting on a pair of rollerblades. “Are you going rollerblading?”

Noelle gives her half a smile.

“Right,” she says. “You’re putting on rollerblades, but you’re going for a swim.”

“Do you want to come along?”

“Really?”

“You look like you could stand to get out of the house. I know I can.”

“Calder’s on the Internet,” she says. “By the time we get back, he’ll have hacked into the Pentagon.”

Noelle is bent over in the hall closet, fishing around among the rain boots and beach towels and shuttlecocks and running shoes. She turns back to Thisbe. “What size are you?”

“An eight.”

“Here,” she says. “These might fit you.” She tosses a pair of rollerblades at Thisbe’s feet.

Noelle is at the foot of the stairs now, skating forward and back. “You should be a good partner, a California girl like you.” She bends over and touches her toes, then skates around the foyer in circles.

They skate down Cliffwood into town. Thisbe may be a California girl, but the first time she skated was when she was four and her mother took her to the ice rink at Rockefeller Center in the shadow of that year’s Christmas tree. Bowdoin had a women’s club ice hockey team, which required less skill than enthusiasm, but she had enough of both to play for a couple of years. She could skate backwards and could whack at the puck with sufficient accuracy to send it skidding toward the goal. But what she liked best about ice hockey, about skating in general, was when she put her shoes back on. Those first few steps: it was as if she were being transported on helium. She feels the same way when she emerges from a sauna. Air! It’s like the world is saying, “Come take me!”