Swimming Across the Hudson (21 page)

Dear Mr. Suskind,

I received your letter. I wasn't planning to respond to it, but suffise it to say, I've changed my mind. I'm in touch with Susan. She's still my wife. I know how she's doing. I'd prefer it if you'd mind your own business. Don't patronize me. Susan's out there to see you, and if your feeling guilty about it, keep it to yourself. What's happening in my marriage is my business—mine and Susan's. I'm not interested in your counseling. I try to have better manners than this, and I'm not usually so abrupt with strangers. But I want to make myself perfectly clear.

Sincerely,
     

Frank Green

My first thought was, Bad spelling and grammar.
Suffice
was with a
c. You're feeling
, not
your feeling
. No wonder Susan was spending time with me. I had good spelling and grammar, and Frank didn't.

My second thought was, Oh shit. I'd gotten Frank angry, as I should have expected. Had he told Susan about my letter? Maybe she was waiting for me to confess. That was almost worse—not knowing, being dangled.

I called her up to see if she'd say anything.

“How are things with your husband?” I asked.

“About what you'd expect.”

But that was the problem. I didn't know what to expect. That was how everything went with Susan. It was one day this, another day that.

“I wouldn't know what to expect,” I said.

“Well, I'm here and he's there. That should say something.”

Maybe he hadn't told her.

When Tara came home, I was relieved. I hugged her in the doorway to our apartment. “I missed you,” I said. “I really did.”

“You act like I was kidnapped or something.” Tara told us about Amy, her new best friend, who was born in New York City. Amy and Tara had given each other crew cuts. “I'm moving to New York,” Tara said. She gave Jenny a list of new dietary restrictions, although it wasn't clear what unified them. She said she no longer ate processed food. She told Jenny that she wanted to go to boarding school on the East Coast, that it was time for her to live on her own, the way she had in the wilderness at camp.

“Boarding school isn't in the wilderness,” Jenny said. “It's in boring towns in Massachusetts where the headmaster makes sure you're properly dressed and you have to do a lot of homework. Besides, it's expensive and you're too young to go.”

But Tara was insistent. “I'll pay for it,” she said. “I'll start babysitting.”

“You'll have to baby-sit a few hundred years in order to pay for boarding school.”

“I got a new hole in my ear.”

Jenny frowned. “I noticed. I hope you used a sterilized needle.”

“I did it with a fork.”

“You did not.”

“I'm going to school on the East Coast because I can't stand California.”

“What's wrong with California?” I asked.

“It's boring.”

I ran my hand through the fuzz on her head. “I, for one, like California.”

“That's easy for you to say. You got to grow up in New York.”

“And you get to grow up in San Francisco, where the ocean is only a few miles away and you can play outdoors all year.”

“I like cold weather.”

“Well, Ben and I have good news for you,” Jenny said. We told Tara about our plans for a trip to New York to surprise my father for his birthday.

 

O
n a Friday morning, Jenny, Tara, and I flew to New York. Sandy and Jonathan would come later that afternoon, after they were done with work.

“You and I are flying separately,” Jonathan joked, “so that if one of us gets killed, the other will be around to take care of Mom and Dad.”

Someday we
would
have to take care of them. My father was healthy, but he'd started to slow down. My previous visit to New York, I'd found myself testing him, quickening my gait as we walked together, hoping that he could keep up with me.

I sat on the plane between Jenny and Tara, reading a copy of
Time
magazine. A movie was playing—something with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme—but I hadn't rented the headphones. I tried to read the actors' lips.

I'd ordered a kosher meal. I always did this when I flew, for sentimental reasons more than anything else. When I was a child, I liked getting the kosher meal in its unperforated wrapping, my name stamped on the foil as if the food had been mailed to me directly from God.

We landed at Kennedy late that afternoon. My parents wouldn't be there; they didn't know we were coming. Even so, as we walked toward the baggage claim area, I scanned the names on the cardboard signs.

We reached the apartment at seven. “Happy Labor Day,” I said when my parents opened the door. “Happy birthday, Dad.”

“Oh my God,” my mother said.

We all hugged one another. Then we huddled in a big hug. My parents were thrilled to see the three of us—even Jenny, it seemed.

“What are you doing here?” my father asked.

“It's your birthday, Dad. I'll never again have a father who turns seventy-five.”

He smiled. “I hope you'll be here on my hundred and twentieth.” That's what he was entitled to hope for. Jews prayed to live as long as Moses.

“We're a little short on food,” my mother said, “but we'll manage.”

Tara emptied her pockets of a dozen packets of peanuts she'd stolen from the plane.

My mother touched her hand. “You got a haircut, hon.”

“And another hole in my ear.”

My father said the kiddush. He and I sang the sabbath songs, everyone else humming with us. The room was warm, the candles flickered, and I kicked off my shoes and rested my feet on the carpet, feeling Jenny's toes pressed against mine.

“I'm glad you're all here,” my mother said.

“We are too,” said Jenny.

My parents' magazines sat next to the grand piano. Years of issues were accumulated there. Friday night at midnight, when the lamps went off, my father would press his
New York Review of Books
against the window, hoping to read another paragraph in the light from the streetlamps.

At eleven there was a knock on the door. My mother looked startled when she opened it. Jonathan and Sandy were standing there, tired smiles on their faces.

“I don't believe it.” My mother turned to me. “Did you know about this?”

“No.” I laughed.

“Of course he knew, Mom.” Jonathan walked over and kissed her. He kissed my father too.

We all sat in the living room. “You boys,” said my mother, shaking her head. I thought I could see tears in my parents' eyes.

Around midnight my father went to bed. My mother removed five sets of towels from the linen closet. She handed a set each to Jenny, me, and Tara and placed the other sets on Jonathan's bed along with a second pillow.

“You're letting us sleep together?” Jonathan asked. Sandy had visited the apartment only twice, and both times they'd slept in separate rooms.

“You're adults,” my mother said, “and if Jenny and Ben are going to sleep together, it's only fair to be consistent. And Dad's gone to sleep, so he doesn't need to know.” She fluffed up the pillows on Jonathan's bed and patted down the blankets. “Besides, where else am I going to put you guys?”

That night in bed I asked Jenny, “Do you think Jonathan has AIDS?”

“What?” She sat up. “Where did you get that idea?”

“The thought must have occurred to you.”

“I just always assumed—”

“When he got sick a couple of weeks ago—he was really sick, Jen, you should have seen him—I couldn't stop thinking about it. I didn't want to say anything to you then. I was too scared.”

“But he's fine now.”

“He
seems
fine. But who gets the flu in August?”

“He and Sandy are monogamous, aren't they?”

“I assume so. But there's the time they broke up after college, and whoever else they slept with before they started going out.”

“You could ask him if he's positive. He's your brother, you know.”

“I can't. I tried in college, but he wouldn't talk about it. And what if he's positive? I'd kill myself.”

“No you wouldn't.”

She was right. But it was more than just a figure of speech. It wasn't simply that I couldn't imagine his dying. I couldn't fathom living without him. Even now that we were older and much had changed between us, he was the closest approximation to me in the world. We shared something deeper than genes.

“He looks healthy, don't you think?”

“Magic Johnson looks healthy too,” I said.

The next day, Saturday, my father went to services and my mother slept in, and the rest of us ate breakfast at a diner on Columbus Avenue, where we sat and read the paper. Then Sandy and Jonathan went to the Metropolitan Museum, while Jenny, Tara, and I took the subway down to Greenwich Village. Amy had told Tara about the Village, and Tara had insisted we go there.

“That's where I'm going to live when I grow up,” Tara said. “When I finally escape California.”

“The East Village or the West Village?” I asked.

“Who cares? The whole thing's the Village.” She rolled her eyes at me, as if I were the one in New York for the first time and my ignorance of the Village were too embarrassing to countenance.

We had lunch on Bleecker Street, then wandered in and out of boutiques and used-clothing stores. Tara tried on a denim jacket she wanted Jenny to buy for her, but Jenny said it was too expensive.

We were going to take the subway uptown so I could show Jenny and Tara my old high school.

“We've spent less than an hour in the Village,” Tara said.

“That's not true, hon,” said Jenny. “We've spent close to three hours here, and there are other things to do in New York.”

“Who wants to see Ben's high school anyway?”

“I do,” Jenny said.

The school was on the Upper East Side. I hadn't been back in many years. Although it was Saturday and the doors were locked, I could make out the bank of elevators.

“That was my locker,” I told Jenny. “Number three eighty-four.”

Jenny pressed her nose against the glass.

“I still remember the smell. Sweaty gym clothes and chocolate-covered doughnuts. Jonathan and I stored Entenmann's in there.”

“Where do the elevators go?” Jenny asked.

“To the classrooms.”

“I can't believe you went here.”

“Why not?”

“Who takes elevators to class? That's about as real as going to school in a spaceship.”

“You probably hung out in treehouses after school.”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“That's a lot stranger than taking elevators to class. It sounds like
Little House on the Prairie
.”

Jenny turned around. “Where's Tara?”

She was gone.

“Oh my God!” Jenny said.

We were standing between Fifth and Madison avenues. I ran toward Fifth and Jenny ran toward Madison, although it wasn't clear why either of us was running. We could have passed her in our haste.

I ran back and forth across the street. I must have looked like a madman. Out of breath, I asked several doormen whether they'd seen a girl walk by, or whether they'd noticed anything suspicious. They hadn't. I stopped a few strangers on the sidewalk, but no one seemed eager to help. I ran back toward Madison Avenue, where Jenny too was stopping strangers. She looked frantic.

I headed uptown while Jenny headed down. I stopped everyone I passed. I thought I spotted Tara's back inside a bakery, but the girl
who turned around was Asian. I flagged down a policeman, but when I told him what had happened, he wasn't helpful. He assured me that Tara would show up soon.