Signs and Wonders (26 page)

So I stopped bringing it up. Occasionally I thought about our weird conversation about his funeral. But even in retrospect it didn’t strike me as morbid. This was how Martin was—he wasn’t afraid to ask a strange question or make a peculiar gesture. It was a way for him to figure out where he stood with you. I guessed he’d wanted that with Millie, too. He must have gotten his answer.

For whatever reason, after Martin went away the rest of us stopped calling one another so much. What had felt like a tight, permanent pack turned out to be loose and temporary. We still met up, just not as often, and the daily phone check-ins slowed to a trickle.
Millie got a new, serious boyfriend. Sarah’s roommate left the city for grad school. She and I buckled down at work. We stopped talking about the titmouse and laughing so much at the office.

One day, without warning, Eric died. Janet called and said, “He had a massive heart attack! They found him in bed. It’s going to be a mess cleaning that place up, I think he kept the accounts in a shoe box under his bed or something. Anyway, you should probably take the day off. Take the week.”

I hung up. Sarah was bent over her desk, her shiny black hair brushing the manuscript pages she was reading. Her hands were clasped over her ears, as they always were when I was on the phone.

“Eric’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“No, seriously.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Janet just told me.”

She looked up and shook her head slightly, as if shaking herself awake. Then, to my surprise, she burst into tears. I reached over and hugged her. We huddled there together, like little kids.

The next day, when we showed up for work, the office was locked. We each got a letter with a severance check from the nonprofit that ran the magazine. I was puzzled but Sarah was irate; she kept talking about breaking into the office and writing to the authors. “There’s a proper way of doing things,” she kept saying, “and this most certainly is not it.” I’d never heard her say things like
proper
and
most certainly.
When I suggested maybe we should just move on, she turned on me like I was a traitor. “Don’t you care?” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

We attended Eric’s funeral together, at a pretty church in the West Village. He seemed to have no family but tons of friends, and they told stories about him as a young man, funny, romantic, and reckless: how he accepted a dare to swim in the East River at midnight, and almost drowned; how he tried to bribe Susan Sontag to publish in the magazine by bringing osso buco to her apartment. He never married, and the magazine seemed to have been his greatest love. Sarah and I nudged each other when we spotted writers we recognized. We didn’t talk to anybody. We were the youngest people there, and nobody knew who we were.

After that, we scrambled to find new jobs. With my supposed sales experience, I found a position in market research, and Sarah was hired by a glossy women’s magazine. Within a year she was promoted. I remember her calling me from her office, a rare occurrence by that point.

“Guess what I’m doing,” she said.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I’m about to have a meeting,” she said. “With my
assistant.
”

We were on the other side. I got promoted too, and though I didn’t have an assistant I had what felt like a real salary, and I left my closet-sized bedroom and rented a studio in Park Slope. Sarah and I were both working long hours, and didn’t have much time to hang out. We never saw Millie at all. Sarah moved to L.A. for a few years to help launch a new magazine, then returned to New York. As a market analyst, I drifted away from the media world that consumed Sarah’s time, and we rarely crossed paths. She and I would make plans to get together, but it was hard to schedule
around our jobs and families. Our arrangements kept falling through. Finally we were able to catch up over lunch, at a garden café near her apartment on the Upper West Side. She was the editorial director of a multimedia company; she asked me about my work and smiled politely through the answer. We showed each other pictures of our children, her five-year-old daughter and my twin boys.

Over coffee she said, “By the way, did you hear that Martin Horst died?”

I set my cup down. Though it was summer and we were eating outside, I felt cold. “No,” I said. “When?”

“A couple months ago.”

“What happened?”

“Unclear. There were prescription drugs involved. He had a bad back and some other health problems. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was an OD? Nobody seems to know for sure.”

“This was in New York?”

“No, in South Carolina. He’d been back home for quite a while, I think.”

“How did you hear about this?”

“The usual. Friends forwarding e-mails. Facebook.”

“Martin was on Facebook?”

“No, but Millie is, and she heard about it from his ex-wife. I guess they were friendly. She’s an art dealer or something and Millie knows her.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I should’ve guessed something was up. Martin used to send all these funny group e-mails, especially during the election, he was really worked up about that, but then he went pretty quiet.”

For some reason my fingers were trembling. Learning that
Martin was dead—he would’ve been forty, maybe forty-five?—was part of it. To think of his dying, to think of the pain that must have accompanied it, made my stomach hurt. But I was also shaken to learn that Sarah had been in touch with him, and with Millie, who’d been in touch with an ex-wife I hadn’t even known existed. A web I was no longer part of.

Across the table, Sarah squinted as the afternoon sun hit her face. “Oh dear,” she said. “You have that look on your face all over again.”

“What look?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he broke your heart.”

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. When I thought back on that time, I didn’t register any heartbreak. I did recall Martin, vividly: his hunched shoulders; his attentive, watery eyes; and his disappearance, a loose thread unraveling a world I was just beginning to know. But I could barely picture the person I’d been back then, probably because I was vague even to myself. I hadn’t become anybody yet.

Sarah put on her sunglasses. She’d paid the bill, and now she stood up.

“Remember when he licked Millie’s knee that time?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I was there.”

The kid came out of the airport security area with his face turned to the windows, scuttling sideways like a crab. He was wearing skinny dark jeans and a red plaid shirt too hot for summer, and his dyed black hair jetted down over his eyes in an aggressive point. Inès had said, “He looks like a dirty little bird you would see in Buenos Aires or somewhere like that. Don’t worry, you will recognize him.” It was typical of her, this description: fanciful, excessive, weirdly accurate. He knew right away that this was his boy.

“Bruno,” he called.

The boy gave a minimal nod, came through the exit, and kissed Art on both cheeks. “
Salut,
Papa,” he said.

“Welcome to New York.”

Bruno said nothing. As they waited at the baggage carousel, Art asked how the flight was, if he was hungry or thirsty, and received three shrugs in return. So he gave up. Silence accompanied them through the taxi line, and on the ride to Brooklyn. The boy’s eyes were trained out the window as the city came closer, his white
earbuds firmly implanted. Though it had only been a few years since they’d seen each other, he seemed a stranger. Between twelve and fifteen was a lifetime, Art knew, but the last time he’d visited Bruno was still a child, and they’d strolled through the fields around Inès’s country house in Provence holding hands, he was amazed to remember. They’d played catch and wrestled. For a couple of summers he’d been too sick to make his yearly trip, and now his son was a teenager with an eyebrow ring. Inès had said he was having trouble in school, alluding vaguely to the wrong kind of friends.
Maybe you help him on the straight road,
she’d written in her e-mail, another unidiomatic phrase that made perfect sense.

They were almost at his apartment when the boy started nodding and singing along to whatever music was on his iPod. “Hey, baby, you gonna get with me, I show you what to do with that perfect ass. I slap you, I tap you—”

Art poked him and gestured for him to take the earbuds out. “We’re almost home.”

The boy nodded, taking in the brownstones, the trees, the stores. “It’s good, this place,” he said sweetly. “I’m glad I come live with you.”

“Sure,” Art said nervously. He and Inès had only discussed a three-week visit. But he didn’t say anything to his son, who he now noticed had flecks of sleep in his eyes. Bruno rubbed them with his fists, the gesture rendering him again the child of Art’s memory. He got Bruno inside, gave him a sandwich and a glass of milk, and put him to bed on the futon in his office. Then he took his laptop into the living room and e-mailed Inès:
Wanted to let you know that he got here safely. He said something about coming here “to live.” He means for the month, right? Just checking that we’re all on the same page.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want Bruno here. The whole week he’d been nervous, cleaning up the apartment and rearranging the office; he even found himself, bizarrely, going on a diet, wanting both his place and his person to look their best. But he was never confident about any communication with Inès, who tended to listen to other people’s points of view and then do whatever she wanted. This free-spirited determination was part of her charm, and probably also the reason why she’d never married. When they’d met and had their fling, he was on vacation in Paris, recovering from his divorce. Inès had shown him a great time, and he remembered laughing so hard that his stomach muscles hurt. They got really drunk night after night and smoked a ton of pot and had sex in a cemetery. They agreed it was just for fun, a weeklong thing, a release they both needed. Three months later she called to say she was pregnant and going to keep the baby.

The contours of a new life sketched themselves in Art’s vision, a French wife, an apartment in Paris, a child. “Should I, uh, move over there or something?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Inès said. “You don’t need to do anything. I am thirty-five, this is my chance for mothering. I want to grab this.”

She’d cleared him of all obligations, but he hadn’t cleared himself. So he’d taken to spending his summer vacations in France to be with his round-cheeked, blond-haired son, who treated him like the distant relative he supposed he was. Bruno always seemed happy enough to see him arrive and never particularly distressed to see him go. And Inès was also happy—motherhood agreed with her. When her parents died she inherited a stone house outside of Aix, and the summers there were like living in a Cézanne, all haystacks
and brilliant sunsets. It wasn’t how Art had ever expected to become a father, but it wasn’t bad.

He fell asleep in his armchair, the laptop balanced on his knees, and when he woke up Bruno was in the kitchen making eggs. He moved confidently around the kitchen in his tank top and jeans, a cigarette pursed between his lips. He looked like a forty-year-old ex-con fresh from the joint. Bruno nodded for him to sit down, doling some eggs onto a plate and adding buttered toast. There was also coffee.

“Thanks,” Art said.

Bruno shrugged Gallically. “I always make for my mother.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Her cooking is garbage. I cook so I can eat.”

Bruno sat down, throwing his cigarette into a glass of water he’d apparently designated for that purpose, since three butts were already floating there. The eggs were creamy, the coffee strong. By the time Art had taken two bites, Bruno had finished his. Then he leaned back in his chair and lit another cigarette.

“So,” he said. “Are you still sick?”

Art met his gaze. “No, I’m well now.”

“But you had it … removed?” The boy’s hand fluttered ambiguously around the seat of his chair.

The question started as bravado, but ended in nerves. Art thought,
You little fucker.
He didn’t stop staring at the boy, whose gaze finally dropped to the ground.

“I had one ball removed. You know what a ball is, right?”

“Of course I know.”

“What’s it called in French?”

“Testicule.”

“So, I still have one test-ee-cool,” Art said, drawing out the pronunciation. “Which is enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“For whatever,” Art said tightly.

Suddenly they both laughed.

Bruno shook his head, grinning. “It’s funny how you say
testicule.
”

“I know. I speak French like Inès cooks.”

His kid laughed again, and the tension between them eased. Bruno cleared the table and washed the dishes, which impressed Art, and he also emptied the butts out of the glass and set it aside, marking it as his ashtray for the summer. They spent the rest of the day in the neighborhood, Art showing him the grocery store, the park, the Italian social clubs where old guys hung out, monitoring the street traffic. For dinner they ate outside at a café, Bruno ordering and being served, without question, a glass of red wine. Art remembered himself at fifteen, pimpled and sweaty, with three hairs on his upper lip that refused to coalesce into a mustache, agonizing for hours over an excuse to call Alison Kozlowski on the phone. Bruno couldn’t have been more different. But they talked easily enough, laughing about Inès, remembering a trip they’d taken to Marseilles when Bruno was very young. When they got home, Bruno went to sleep and Art checked his e-mail, finding an enigmatic one-line response from Inès:
Why don’t you see what happens?