In the Middle of All This (23 page)

“They haven't returned any of my calls,” he said.

“They will, they will. But this is good news. I wouldn't bother them too much, though. They'll get around to us. They're probably just exhausted.”

“Whatever,” he said.

“I'll leave a message, too. I wanted to tell you that your father is back in the hospital. Kidney failure. He's doing much better. But if I give you his number, will you call him? He's a little down.”

“Of course,” he said.

She gave him the phone number. “I'd better run.”

“I love you,” he said.

“You, too.”

When he put down the phone he realized that despite the television Max was crying again, and he'd been shouting to be heard. “Oh honey,” he said. He picked him up and held him. The boy sobbed hard against him, his chest rigid, his heart pounding near Martin's. “I'm sorry,” Martin said. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Can we call Grandpa?”

The next day at work, she handed in their grade sheets and listened with apparent interest to the news that not only was Annka taking over as the sole chair of the department but that David Lazlo would be returning from his sabbatical with the woman from Kansas and her two boys. She tried to summon disgust or revulsion but she only felt
so what
. And wasn't it remarkable that Cindy was moving forward with her hip replacement surgery despite having no one to lean on? someone asked her. She nodded but said nothing.

In the afternoon there was a knock at her door and there stood Ruben, his face sagging and his beard trimmed.

“You coming?” he said.

“Oh right,” she said, pushing herself from the chair. She followed him down toward the quad.

“Where's Martin?” he murmured as they fell into the silence building around them.

“He's kind of on his way out of town,” was all she murmured in return.

They stood with the others in a thick circle around a small patch of unpacked lawn beside which stood a bundled baby spruce tree. The president offered a brief invocation, the provost added a few words. Then two of Jane Wilson's sorority sisters lifted the baby spruce and set it in its hole.

“From the class of '03, for its dear friend Jane Wilson,” the class president read from a small rectangular brass marker. “Your memory will grow in us all.”

As the circle broke up, a workman came and began to drill the plaque into a small raised stone set in the ground.

“You know,” Ruben said as he walked back with Lauren, “I'm not at all sorry I lost the co-chair.”

“I can imagine,” Lauren said.

She sat at the computer in her office, clicking through e-mail, trying to set aside whatever she felt about what awaited in London, about all those unknowable students out there, about their own uncertain careers. About life. Was it all really so uncertain? The dread would crush her if she let it. She was sick of all the migraines she let happen, sick of all the migraine medication she let herself take, sick of her optimism and naiveté and fragility and agitation. Life in the middle of all this? Life
was
the middle of all this.

Earlier than scheduled she parked at day care and stepped from the car. In the fenced yard she could see Max whipping around the plastic slide set with the other children, laughing and laughing, and she stood there for a moment before he saw her, before she let him see her, watching him.

“So,” Richard said, sitting across from him at the kitchen table as they sipped tea and stared out the back French doors into the clipped yard, Martin's bag dropped in the hall, the place so still you could balance an egg anywhere in it.

“How have you been?” Martin asked.

“I can't complain.”

“It's good of you to see me.”

“Not a bother, really. I'm here. Now you're here. It's not like I had to do anything.”

“Can I ask you what your plans are?”

“Of course. Of course. We're going to sell the house. I still have some time off left. There might be travel. Perhaps a posting to another city. Don't know, really. Beyond that, I mean.”

“I see,” Martin said. He wanted to be gentle, but he just didn't know. What was there to know?

“She, uh, she sent along some things to you.” He reached into a stack of bags and boxes beside him on the table and pulled out a velour sack about the size of a fist. “Things she said she wouldn't be needing anymore.”

“Thank you,” Martin said, his face growing numb, as he tried to keep his features smooth, tried not to crumble, to let what he could happen.

Richard shoved the sack across the table to him. “It's what she wanted you to have. Most especially for Sarah.”

“Should I open it?”

“If you like.”

“I don't know what to do,” Martin said miserably.

“Have some more tea,” he said. He moved to the stove and brought the kettle over, poured it into the cups.

“What
can you tell me?”

“What does it matter?” Again he sipped his tea. “What will it matter? That's all for each of us to sort out.”

“Oh man.” Martin got up and went to the doors. There was no longer any wood block for a pane, and he tried to see which pane he had broken, but now he couldn't tell. He'd never see her again. Maybe he had never seen her. Was that what this was all about? How for years—
years
—they'd never known each other. There'd been all that intensity, all that intimacy, as they'd grown up and fought their way out, broke all the rules and slammed around the house, their mother screaming after them. How Elizabeth promised that when she ran away she would take him. How he caught her packing without him and threatened to tell on her unless she stayed. But once out, once separated, along their own paths, was when the distance had begun. It was a failure of life, how hard it was to stick together, how impossible, and you had to find that other person, that lover, and then maybe there were kids, and for a time they were part of what you had, and then they would leave, and there would be only more distance between what you had known so well—what you had breathed every day—and what you would have now. Long-distance phone calls. Weekends. Maybe a week here or there. But not that seemingly endless, sealed-off world of when you were children or when your children were children, when you had each other all the time and it was both never enough and almost too much.

Now Richard was at the door with him. “I heard you broke down this thing,” he said. “Mitch told me. He had some glazier in to repair it. I can see it, but only because I know.”

“What a mess,” Martin said.

He put his hand lightly on Martin's shoulder. “Maybe what I said is all a bunch of crap. But it's a bunch of crap I believe in. You want a beer?”

It wasn't yet ten o'clock. “Sure.”

He brought two bottles to the table and opened them. “Glass?”

“No.”

They drank from the brown bottles and looked out the doors and looked across the kitchen and looked at the table. And all he could think of was that one time they'd had to go for dinner, and she wasn't up to it but she'd gone anyway though she hoped it wouldn't be too long and it was; it was quite long. And how he'd sat there drinking with the rest of them, watching her endure it.

“So you're not going to open it?” Richard asked as he pointed at the pouch with his bottle.

“I'll open it with Sarah.”

“That's nice.”

Martin took a deep plunge into the beer, and when he came out he felt a bit more ready. “Did you give her some kind of ultimatum?” he said. “Is that what happened?”

Richard looked both perplexed and amused, maybe even a little hurt. “All along I've been doing what she told me to do. No more. No less. Just exactly what she wants.”

“But why … why did she take herself away from us?” He got up and went for two more beers, wanting only to listen, trying to look casual about it. “Was it out of anger?”

“The choices she's making, they're very private,” he said quietly, and Martin found himself latching on to his use of the present tense. “They go beyond the self, really.” He accepted an opened bottle from Martin. “What she's trying to do is really quite beautiful.”

“What if we wanted to find out more?”

“You Kreutzels.” He shook his head sadly. “You don't know how to accept anything.”

Martin looked at him carefully, the creases in his forehead deeper, more flecks of gray in the hair that hung over the tips of his ears. The pale hands were strangely calm. He thought they used to quiver slightly. It was getting harder and harder for him to see any difference between the way things had been and the way they were now. He could always sense the broad failure of how they'd all been with Elizabeth, but he was losing track of each specific one, his own pathetic, halfhearted, half-realized gestures, his self-involvement in his own guilt. But wasn't that better than looking away? Or was it just another way of looking past her? He'd missed too much, but it seemed so indeterminable.

“What if we wanted a funeral?” he said.

“Who said there needed to be a funeral?” Richard said sharply.

“I mean, just suppose.”

“What's so great about a funeral? The dead don't know anything about funerals.”

Hadn't this whole fucking struggle been between the desperation to say the things you knew they wanted you to say (
Everything's going to be okay. You're doing everything right
) and to say the things you knew you shouldn't ever say, that they couldn't bear to hear (
You have to leave him. You have to come home
)? Or was it about what you did when there was nothing you could do?

“We don't need to be having these kinds of conversations,” Richard said.

“But that's why I came,” Martin said.

For a while he lay in the guest room, trying to sleep. That had always been the routine. They used to have drinks standing up in the kitchen, a little rest, then go out to meet Richard for lunch near his office. There was a Greek place on a walking street, and the one time he brought the kids they chased each other around a fountain. At meals Elizabeth would have hummus and olives and sip bottled water while he and Richard and Lauren, if she were there, would drink wine and dig into various types of flesh. He tried to visit every two or three months.

Back when she and Richard got married, eight or nine years ago, they asked Martin to drive them from the ceremony to the reception. Martha and his mother teased him about how he ought to wear a cap and uniform. Lauren sat beside him in the front seat of the rented white Cadillac, and they drove from the old downtown synagogue along the expressway toward Mount Washington. It was a misty, soggy day. Richard and Elizabeth sat very close in the backseat, sipping champagne, kissing, thanking him too profusely for driving, saying how they had really wanted to share this moment with them. Two new couples.

They pulled up a winding road to a hilltop glass house filled with catering people, a jazz band brought up from Washington, 150 celebrants. Martin opened the car door for his sister. She slid from the backseat all in white, the veil lifting over her hair like a petal. Later, as the band paused expectantly and the mist that clung to the windows seemed to have lightened against the falling darkness, Richard's sister raised her glass. “And do take care of our brother Richard,” she said after whatever usual jokes she'd felt obligated to recite, and suddenly her voice was soft and tentative. “He is the only one we have, and we love him very much.”

Now Martin descended the stairs and saw through the shut glass door of the study the back of Richard as he sat at the computer and Richard wheeled around and motioned him in.

“Jet-lagged?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I'm just finishing up here. And then we could go out for a bite to eat. How long did you think you'd stay?”

Martin shrugged.

“You can use the phone if you want.”

“Thanks.”

He sat in the kitchen, drinking water. The jet lag made everything seem even more unreal than it already was.

“Still in bad shape?” Richard called in.

Under the blue sky they took the Alfa Romeo with the top down, and he faced the wind and tried to feel it as fully as he could.

“Great weather,” Richard shouted.

“Yes,” he shouted back.

They went to the best Indian there was, a marble-and-leather place where the four of them had once gone together, a vast hierarchy of wait staff, a twenty-page wine list.

“I think I'll drop in at the ashram, so we haven't much time.”

Martin nodded. They ordered immediately. He hadn't eaten in a day or two. When the beer came he took long sips and tried to feel more alert.

“What
do
you want to do?” he finally said. “We can't just let it dissolve into nothing.”

“We can't?” Richard took his napkin and unfolded it in his lap. “Well, I can't worry about what you think is going on. There's too much that I have to do, and I need to be off again soon.”

“I can feel it,” Martin said, not touching the food. “I can feel the absence.”

Richard looked at him. “You don't really believe that.”

“I don't know what to believe.”

“That's the problem. Everybody needs something to believe. That's exactly what I've been trying to tell you.”

Martin ate silently, nothing he could right now taste. When they'd been here Elizabeth had been allowing herself a small nibble from everyone's dish, digressing from her rigid diet.
I'm being bad
, she'd said. She had a tiny sip from Lauren's wine.
Aren't I horrible?

“Your mum called,” Richard was saying. “She thinks she's coming tomorrow. To help out. To help with what? I said. It's what people do, she said. There's nothing to help with, I said.”

“What about my father?”