Jasmine (17 page)

“We love you,” Wylie said, simply.

I crushed my face into her sweatshirt. If I let go of her, I’d be losing everything.

“Taylor loves you,” Wylie said, “but you must know that.”

“Don’t go,” I begged. “Don’t leave. Please.” What was it that Taylor had explained about weak gravity? Batwinged nightmares flapped frantically; I didn’t want them flying out of my skull.

Two weeks later Wylie left, for Paris. She let Taylor think she might be back, might not. He asked what I thought. What are the odds on four years and a kid together lasting into five or ten? He acted forbearing even when aggrieved. Prakash would have slugged and raved. Prakash would have been impossibly possessive. He would have put in
new locks and bars on the
outside
of the front door to the apartment. The Claremont codes still bewildered me.

The odds on Wylie coming home again were nonexistent, but I didn’t tell Taylor. Wylie’d confided before she left that Stuart was joining her. Ten glorious days without children on the Continent.

“It’ll be okay,” I comforted Taylor. “Everything’ll be okay. Wait and see.”

Taylor let himself be comforted. “It won’t be okay by itself. But you’ll make it okay, Jase. If you hadn’t been here, I’d have gone crazy.”

Maybe Wylie, who could see more clearly into people’s hearts than I did, was right. Maybe Taylor
was
very fond of me. Even a little bit in love with me. But in love with me in a different way than he was in love with witty, confident Wylie. On the nights that he had time to help tuck Duff in bed—a ritual that Wylie’d cherished—he wanted me to stay in the darkened room, to sit on my cot with him so he could lay one of his big pale hands on Duff’s and the other on mine and spin long bedtime stories about the muddles and mysteries of physics. On those nights, we—Duff, Taylor, and I—became a small, self-sufficient family, and I told myself, guiltily, that everything might really work out all right. I prayed that Wylie and Stuart would take all the time they needed in Europe, because I, the caregiver, was eager to lavish care on my new, perfect family.

Wylie’d wanted me to meet Stuart, and so I did. I think now that in the smart magazines that she read there were probably articles on the dos and don’ts for introducing your
live-in caregiver to your live-out lover. Claremont Avenue was a brave new world for me. Our first meeting was in Stuart’s apartment, and I know I acted awkward and bashfully formal. Stuart was tall and pleasant and extremely thin. He ran six miles a day along Riverside Drive—he’d even noticed Duff and me playing in the park. He had been to India several times as a guest lecturer in Delhi, as a World Bank consultant, as a U.S. government aid officer. He spoke Hindi passably and owned so many Indian paintings and tapestries that his living room looked to me like a shop or an art gallery. His wife was an Africa specialist, so the walls were hung with spears and masks that competed with mirror-work cloths and Moghul miniatures. Their three sons were in private schools in Massachusetts. If there had been no Taylor, Stuart would have been perfect. Knowing Taylor, I found Stuart too secure, too vain, too solicitous.

I carried on. So did Taylor, who sunk himself in his lab and made sure he was always home at the right hour for Duff’s dinner and bedtime. Though Taylor’s grin had stiffened into a pained and patient smile, he didn’t seem bitter about the reduced size of the family. The truth is, we were happy, happier than when Wylie’d been around filling up the apartment with her restlessness and unspoken guilt. Now the rooms seemed warmed by a mute intimacy. My life had a new fullness and chargedness to it. Every day I made discoveries about the city, and in the evenings, when I listed my discoveries to Taylor he listened carefully, as though I were describing an unmapped, exotic metropolis.

Wylie, too, would have been proud of me. I took Duff to the Asia Society to watch an Indian potter. I took her to a fishmonger’s display window on Broadway, so she could see fish dressed in leather ties and dark glasses to look like rock stars. I asked Duff the enriching questions Wylie wanted me to, and let Duff find the answers for herself. I wondered if anyone had asked Wylie enriching questions, if I was creating the foundations for impossible yearning later in Duff’s life. We rode the buses up and down and across our frantic borough to the Muzak of “And what do you call that, sweetheart?” and “Where did we see it before? Did it look different yesterday?”

Taylor took us to Mets games. Only the National League, he said. We don’t do DH. In his growing up in an academic family, there was a secular trinity: NBC, the National League, and the Democratic Party. Anything else was reactionary, racist, anti-intellectual. But when I told Wylie about the trinity, she hooted, What about Edward R. Murrow? Wylie’s point was that teaching me baseball was Taylor’s unthreatening way of courting me. Maybe. At the time I thought he was consoling himself with teaching me.

Taylor didn’t want to change me. He didn’t want to scour and sanitize the foreignness. My being different from Wylie or Kate didn’t scare him. I changed because I wanted to. To bunker oneself inside nostalgia, to sheathe the heart in a bulletproof vest, was to be a coward. On Claremont Avenue, in the Hayeses’ big, clean, brightly lit
apartment, I bloomed from a diffident alien with forged documents into adventurous Jase.

In the first weeks of my adventurousness, when Duff and I decided we’d like some of the merchandise advertised on television, I sent away for it. First came a Japanese knife set. Then a radio-controlled Lamborghini. A cassette car stereo for the car I meant to buy someday. A triple-beveled, herringbone, 14-carat-gold neck chain. By the time a spring mechanism for doing sit-ups arrived, I’d grown afraid of the mail. The mailman was a terrorist delivering small explosive objects that wouldn’t go away, every month new classical recordings and new history books. I was turning over my entire paycheck for things I couldn’t use and didn’t know how to stop.

Taylor rescued me. “America, America!” Taylor said one day. Duff probably told him that I was afraid to go outside. He wrote on a package in thick marking pen
RETURN TO SENDER
. That’s all you need to do, he explained. If something gets too frightening, just pull down an imaginary shade that says
RETURN
on it and you can make it go away.

Could I really have not known that I was head over heels in love with Taylor Hayes?

One Sunday we took our supper in a basket to the park. Duff rolled on the grass. “I’m a puppy,” she squealed. “Tickle me behind the ears. Pick me up by my scruff.” Taylor and I tickled; then Taylor, too, rolled over on the grass.

“Jase,” he said.

He was licking the last of the mango pickle off his fingers. “What would it take to make you stay on?”

“If Duff needs me, I’ll stay.”

“Sure Duff needs you. That’s pretty obvious.” We each had our hands on her, idly tickling.

“I want a hot dog,” she said. “There’s a man over there.”

Taylor peeled off a dollar and sent her on her way.

“I think maybe I need you,” he said. He scrambled for my hand. “I know you think that Wylie is terrible for walking out—”

I started to protest.

“—but that’s not the whole story. She was on to something I wasn’t even aware of.”

He reached for my hand. “She said I’ve been in love with you since the first morning I saw you. Since you came in afraid to talk, not knowing much English …”

“… afraid to sleep alone,” I said. I did not want this conversation to end. It was not like the businessman who wanted to take me with him to India, who would have paid me thousands. Not like the men in shops along Broadway, the doormen and the street vendors and the repairmen who knew I was a day mummy and fundamentally helpless, or at least available. This was a man I had observed for over two years, who had been unfailingly kind, never condescending, always proud of my achievements. I would listen. And then I would do. I twisted over to keep an eye on Duff, who was already coming back to us, hot dog in her hand.

“Ah, about this sleeping-alone stuff,” he said. “Jase? Jase—you listening?”

I acted annoyed. “When have I not listened?”

Duff offered a bite of her hot dog first to Taylor, then to me. She was an instinctively generous, loving child. If we could have stayed like that forever, my world would have righted itself. Fishermen wouldn’t have needed their fish.

“You know what the hot-dog man said?” asked Duff. “He asked me, ‘Is that lady your mummy?’”

Taylor laughed. I squinted across the open field where children were playing whiffle ball, to the dark-skinned hot-dog vendor sitting under his umbrella.

“Jase? What’s wrong? You’re shivering. It’s something I said, isn’t it? Jase, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

He pulled me to my feet and I couldn’t let go of him. I couldn’t look behind me, couldn’t open my eyes. I could hear Taylor’s voice from a long way off saying,
It’s okay, she choked on something, she’ll be all right
.

He was walking me now, half-pulling me, back to the cement benches that lined the mall. I could feel Duff reaching for my hand. I wanted to talk, but my throat had sealed. I couldn’t get my breath, it was like asthma.

We were standing by the traffic light at Ninety-sixth Street, at the bottom of Riverside Drive’s longest hill. “Tell me what’s wrong, for god’s sake. Can I get you anything?”

“That was the man who killed my husband,” I said, between long gasps. “He knows … he knows me. He knows I’m here.”

“For god’s sake, we’ll call the cops,” said Taylor. He was shaken. I told him everything: the marriage, the bombing, the murder. I had been until that time an innocent child he’d picked out of the gutter, discovered, and made whole, then fallen in love with.

“Don’t you see that’s impossible? I’m illegal here, he knows that. I can’t come out and challenge him. I’m very exposed, I’m alone all day, I’m out in the park—” I remembered Wylie’s Stuart having observed me for months, and suddenly I felt filthy, having been observed, tracked, by Sukhwinder.

“New York’s huge. We can move downtown, go to Jersey—”

“This isn’t your battle. He’d kill you, or Duff, to get at me.”

In my life, I have never dithered. God’s plans have always seemed clearly laid out. I said to him, “I’m going to Iowa.”

He said I was crazy to leave New York. Iowa was for little old ladies in tennis shoes and for high-school girls in trouble. He said if ghosts were scaring me, he was the best ghostbuster available.

“Iowa? You can’t go to Iowa—Iowa’s flat.”

24

H
ARLAN
K
ROENER
shot Bud on December 23, two years ago. Du had been with us for about eleven months, but this was his first real American Christmas and we’d tried to make it special. Bud, of course, was a traditionalist who’d gotten away from it after his sons were grown. He was back into it in a big way. He’d even wanted to get a model train, but didn’t have time to set it up.

We had each given Du as many presents as a large tree could shelter, making up for all his missed Christmases past. I was a veteran of American Christmases, since Taylor and Wylie were aggressive sentimentalists, for Duff’s sake, they said, but really because they’d both come from traditional American families, where a Christmas goose
was cooked, presents wrapped, family ornaments packed in protective paper all year, and nothing opened until Christmas morning. They loved to go caroling, holding candles and singing their way down Claremont Avenue. In the Christmas season, New York became just another small town for them, like Taylors upstate New York and Wylie’s Maryland. They took me to the midnight church services, and the weekend trips upstate for skiing and sleigh rides.

I was stooped under the large tree in the corner of the living room, sweeping pine needles off the presents and the white sheet that was supposed to be snow, when I heard the whomp of a heavy mans winter boots on the front steps which Bud had just been shoveling. In fact, I thought it was Bud coming back.

When I turned, straightening up, to see who it was—why shouldn’t I have hoped that it was the UPS man bringing me a gift from Taylor and Duff, or maybe Wylie and Stuart, or even another pair of knitted pink wool slippers from Lillian Gordon?—there was Harlan Kroener filling the front door. I’d seen the rifle under his coat, but I hadn’t thought it strange. Well, strange, yes. I’ve gone through this moment a thousand times. Is it the wife’s job to sort out possible assassins?

When the police came round I said yes, I had seen the rifle. And I’d thought, Shouldn’t he be leaving it in his truck? But in those days Bud didn’t talk to me about his problems, or the bank’s problems. The name Harlan Kroener wasn’t red-flagged in any way. And Bud’s shooting was the first. There’d been some suicides, but never a
murder attempt. So Harlan didn’t register on me as a disturbed and violent farmer who saw himself betrayed by his banker. And no, he didn’t manifest any signs of violence, except for the flat authority of his voice. I should know these things—I know them now. The inexpressive voice comes from a demented man. Flat affect is the sign of murderous rage. Learn to read the world and everyone in it like a photographic negative of reality.

“Where’s Bud?” He said that very quietly. “I’m going to take him with me.” I’d been in Baden less than two years, and though Bud made me feel that without my typing and filing the bank would collapse, I hadn’t caught on to how tense November and December are for the Ag Loans men.

For every banker who can’t overderelict, there’s a farmer who can’t keep up his payments. “Bud,” I called out, “there’s someone here to see you.”

I delivered him to his crippler. Bud was still in his jacket and boots. He’d been in the shed, tinkering with the snowblower. Even a banker is still a farmer at heart.

Bud was such a big, hearty man. He was fifty-three, but I couldn’t calculate the thirty years between us even as a gap, as an October-May kind of thing. He was so fit, so determined to remain fit. He’d quit smoking. He cross-country skied and tried to get me started. In the summer he played tennis and racquetball. He said he’d made his adjustments to the eighties, to cutting back from all the things that spelled manhood to his father’s generation.