The Pale of Settlement (24 page)

It was only later that she took a close look at the photograph
hanging on the bathroom wall. There was Nicole, naked as a virgin, lying on her back on windblown sand. Her eyes closed as if she were asleep, or dead. Her hair fanned out along the ridges of the dunes, sea grass arched across her legs. Her skin almost translucent, pale as sun-bleached bone.

Everything looks different in the snow. The city feels muffled, as if it were holding its breath. Susan's own breath condenses before her face. In the park, the paths and rocks and branches are shades of white and gray, the light luminous and blue. It is days like this that remind Susan that Manhattan is an island, a space carved out by rivers opening to the sea. Her boots squeak along the snow-packed path. Her bag, slung like a messenger's over one shoulder and across her chest, swings against her hip with every stride. There are no runners out today. Along the borders of the park, cars are completely buried beneath the banks thrown up by the plows. Funny how on days like these, she feels most at home. Usually she has the feeling that she could live anywhere in the world, even though New York is the place she's always been. When she first started working as a reporter, she'd assumed that she would be living somewhere else by now, a foreign correspondent in some exotic place. She'd be willing to move yet, she thinks, if she only had a reason—even to a place as far away as Australia, though she has only the vaguest idea of what it is like. Dusty ranches and crocodile-wrestling men and strange animals like wombats or bandicoots. And probably not too many Jews, although there did seem to be Jews in the most unlikely places, like Utah or Shanghai.

The Sheep Meadow is a billowy sea of snow. She'd walked with James along this very path, one drizzly afternoon in fall, not long
after they first met. Wet leaves littered the pavement; the low-slung sky was gray with scudding clouds. He told her about his father, whom he hadn't seen in years. His father was always making money on some harebrained scheme and losing it all. He'd show up without warning, and then abandon them again. The last time he turned up, James said, he wanted me to invest in some real estate venture up in the north. This one's for real, his father said. James loaned him five thousand dollars, which, of course, he never saw again. He told Susan the story without a trace of anger or resentment in his voice. That's the way he is, he said. He can make you believe that anything he says is true.

Later, Susan made a comment about how his childhood had been tough. Tough? James said. What gave you that idea?

My father, Susan's mother said, was a terrible man.

This isn't the same story Susan has heard from other relatives. They talked about how he saved his family from the Holocaust. How as a physician, he was adored.

He was abusive, Susan's mother said, to everyone except his patients, who worshipped him as if he were a god. He lacerated us with words.

Her mother showed her photographs, flipping through the pages of her grandmother's album. Its black pages were interleaved with translucent onionskin stamped in a pattern of a spider's web. It contained photographs of Susan's grandfather from his medical school days in Germany, in the twenties, leaning like a dandy against a tree, one leg crossed before the other, a cigarette tipped between the fingers of one hand. He had wedge-shaped eyebrows, narrow eyes, a square forehead and jaw. A few of the photographs
had holes cut in them: an absence like a silhouette, a body marked by empty space.

My mother did that, I think, Susan's mother said. It must have been the girlfriend he had before he married her.

So she must have loved him, Susan thinks now. In the beginning anyway. Enough to sit there with a scissors in her hand and cut the woman she had replaced out of every photograph. Enough to change the story, excise memory. Susan pictures sewing scissors, the kind with a silver swan's head wrapped around the finger holes. Or was jealousy different than love?

My father kept a row of glass jars in his surgery, Susan's mother said, filled with colored pills. They were sugar pills, although, of course, the patients didn't know that. Placebos. In those days, of course, there wasn't much you could do for people's pain. He measured the pills out carefully, placed them into folded newspaper cones. People took them and were cured.

But how, if they didn't really work? Susan asked.

Her mother's mouth twisted into a smile. Does it matter? People believed they did.

A few months after the Maxim restaurant attack, another woman blows herself up. This time it's a twenty-two-year-old mother of a three-year-old boy and baby girl. She tells the guards at the Gaza checkpoint that the metal detector went off because of an implant from surgery to repair her broken leg. As they approach, she sets off her bomb.

Susan scrolls through clips from the videotape released after the blast. The woman is wearing combat fatigues and a headscarf, a green Hamas sash draped like a beauty pageant banner across her chest.
I wanted to be a
shahid
from the time I was thirteen
, she is
saying on the tape.
It was always my wish to turn my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists, to knock on the doors of heaven with their skulls
. The rhetoric throws Susan off. Is this a tale the woman was forced to tell, or what she actually believed? Susan studies an image of a crowd of men thronging the streets of Gaza City, their fists raised in the air. It looks almost like an outdoor concert, until you notice the green headbands covered in Arabic script, the placards with the blown-up photograph of the martyr's face. A mother carries a toddler dressed as a suicide bomber, a fake explosive belt strapped around his waist, a toy Kalashnikov clutched in his pudgy hand.

The Koran, Susan knows, says that when you become a
shahid
, you go to paradise, where seventy-two sloe-eyed virgins in long white gowns await. A popular music video on Palestine
TV
shows a young man joining his virgins after being shot in the back by Israeli troops. The maidens dance in flowing water. They are nearly translucent, white and pure. They wear their black hair long and loose. According to a recent poll, more than a quarter of the children in Gaza aspire to
shahada
, to die for the jihad. Even the girls. Susan wonders what the appeal of the seventy-two virgins would be for a little girl. She should write a story about that. Maybe, she thinks, if all you have to look forward to is becoming a Muslim wife, an afterlife among the virgins wouldn't seem so bad.

James believed in soul mates and telepathy, psychic emanations and powerful flows of energy that you couldn't rationally understand. He used words like
intention
and
bliss
. They sounded odd coming from such a big man, plumped and filled with promise by his Australian vowels. Susan didn't generally put much stock in New Age philosophies, but with James she found herself going along,
trying to convince herself that the things he said were true. She lay back and closed her eyes as he recited aphorisms from Rumi, platitudes by Richard Bach. He kept a paperback copy of the
Tao Te Ching
in his briefcase, among the pads of graph paper and manila files.
The tao that can be told
, he read aloud,
is not the eternal Tao
. Coming from him, even the flakiest things seemed wise.

Eventually, he told her about Nicole. He'd met her on a flight from New York to Sydney; at the last minute, he switched seats and wound up sitting next to her. He didn't believe in coincidence; there was no such thing as a lucky stroke of chance. You choose what happens to you in life, he said, knowingly or not. Nicole had dazzled him by telling him things he didn't even know about himself that turned out to be true. Like the Aboriginal women who knew how to tap the power of the Dreaming Track, she had the uncanny ability to read the language of desire. Our souls go back a long, long way together, James explained. We need each other, though we can't stand being with each other half the time.

So what about me? Susan wanted to say. What about me?

But like Scheherezade, she was just a visitor to his Bedouin's tent. She knew he meant it when he said he'd soon be going back to Oz. She gathered up her clothes and left in the flat gray light of dawn.

Her mother sat on the edge of her bed. Tell me a story, Susan said. It's late, her mother said. You need to get your sleep. Susan touched the veins that ran blue as map lines along the back of her mother's hands. Strips of yellow light moved along the bedroom walls. Just a short one, Susan said. Tell about the time when you got sick.

Her mother let out a breath and pushed back her hair. When I was five years old, she said, I got an ear infection. This was before penicillin,
the wonder drug. They had to operate to scrape the infection off the mastoid bone. I remember the awful smell of ether, the salty taste of the huge red sulfa pills they ground up in a spoon. They said I nearly died. I was in the hospital for seven weeks. My parents left me there alone. My father—the doctor—was busy working, and my mother was occupied with taking care of him and the boys. I don't remember them visiting me at all, although I suppose that can't be true.

Feel, her mother said, taking Susan's fingers and placing them behind her ear. The ridge of bone felt thin and flat, the skin a little puckered, although Susan couldn't make out a scar. The whole time that I was in the hospital, her mother said, no one ever combed or washed my hair. When I got out, my hair was so snarled and matted that my mother had to cut it off. My father screamed at her that I was ugly now. It was a long time before my hair grew back.

Susan leaned forward, stretched her arms out for a hug. She pressed her face against her mother's chest. She wanted to hug the little girl buried inside her mother now. She wanted to say, Don't leave.

Layla tov
, my sweet, her mother said. Go to sleep.

If James hadn't gotten sick, Susan thinks now, probably she never would have seen him again. She lies back against her pillows and stares into the dark. She has finished her book but still can't fall asleep. She's sorry the story is over; she had wanted to read slowly, but found herself rushing, in spite of her intention, to the end. The blinds are open to the glow of the night sky. Her own reflection wavers, like a phantom, in the glass.

It was in 1995, a couple of years after James and Nicole had moved
back to Australia, that she ran into Patrick at the airport, getting off the shuttle from D.C. Haven't you heard? he said. They stopped along the ramp by the racks of free magazines. Travelers hurried past as he shouted over the noise of the flight announcements crackling overhead. James had been diagnosed several months before. Some form of cancer; Patrick didn't know the details. The doctors had given him a 40 percent chance to live. He was in chemotherapy now. Yes, he was only thirty-three.

When she got back to the newsroom, she sat down right away and wrote James a note. How could she not have gotten back in touch? He was dying, for all she knew.

Two blocks away, the top-floor brownstone light snaps on. Susan squints, but the exhibitionist is nowhere to be seen. There is just the empty armchair, the bookshelf, the potted palm or fern. A yellow rectangle floating in the dark.

They all had lunch together a few months later, Susan and James and Nicole. He was in New York on business; Nicole was tagging along. It was the first and only time she met Nicole face-to-face. Up close, she was not as beautiful as Susan had supposed, although her eyes were a clearer blue and more intelligent than she'd wanted to believe. She had the kind of changeable face that could be made up to look elegant as a model's or scrubbed until all you noticed were the bare rims of her eyes, pink as a rabbit's. Good bones, Susan's mother would have said. Nicole was sitting at a table by herself, wearing an azure coat. James was late. She greeted Susan warmly and they clinked glasses of wine. She had the confident air, Susan thought, of a woman who had got her man. Despite the circumstances, she radiated calm.

Susan had readied herself for the worst, but James hadn't changed at all. He still had his energy and even all his hair. The latest test
results were very good. The tumors were completely gone. If you had to get cancer, he joked, this was the one to get. Nicole smiled and reached out to take his hand. James kept his eyes on Susan as she did. But as usual, she misread the signs.

The light in the brownstone is still on, but the exhibitionist has not appeared. Could this be a signal of some kind? Susan reaches to turn off the bedside lamp, then changes her mind and dims it instead. She pulls off her own nightgown, leans back, slides her hand between her thighs.

It was a day or two after that lunch that she ran into James in the lobby of her building, as if by chance. That night he took her to a restaurant downtown. Over a bottle of wine, he told her the whole story of his illness—the meditation techniques he'd used to harness the healing energy of his mind; how, on what he'd imagined was his deathbed, a vision of her had suddenly appeared.

Me? Susan said.

Tears slid down his cheeks as he leaned forward across the table to take her hands. He clutched them so tightly she could feel her bones shift against his. Yes you, he said. His eyes were bright and blue. I had to see you again, he said, to let you know the way I felt. I couldn't believe that you might never know how much you meant to me. When I got your letter, I knew it was a sign.

My mother was only thirty-seven when she died, Susan's mother said. My father tried to save her. It drove him crazy that when it mattered most, he failed.

Susan has a disjointed memory of her own mother standing at a window, circling a hand over her breast. Sunlight shone through the thin cotton of her nightgown, revealing the outline of her belly and thighs. I am already older than she was when she died, her
mother said. Susan's father said, Come on, Leah! You're strong as an ox! Her mother made a face, but it was obvious she felt relieved.