The Sabbathday River (61 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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This left Naomi and Rachel and David still at the table with the
children. Only Polly seemed unaffected. She sat on Naomi's lap, calmly sipping her juice, as Hannah quietly excused herself and the adults remained in creaky silence. The truth was, Naomi couldn't seem to find the moment her talk had veered to this place, passing through whatever door had evidently closed behind her. Hadn't it all been, as David had said, debate for the sake of heaven? Wasn't it fair to try to prove or disprove God's existence by rational means? Isn't that what they had been doing? But on the other hand, there could be no debate if heaven was not theoretical to begin with. Someone had cheated, by actually believing. And yet it wasn't David who had glared at her with such fury and left the table. Naomi, unable to sit still any longer, lifted Polly to her hip and went into the kitchen. Judith was ladling fruit salad into little bowls. She didn't look up.
“Judith, I'm sorry,” she said.
She looked tired. She gave Naomi a smile that was also tired.
“No, it's all right.”
“I feel terrible. I had no idea I would offend Joel so much.”
Judith shook her head. “No, you couldn't have known. Here, will you cut some of this onto the plates?” She passed Naomi the cake.
“I thought we were only talking,” she went on, putting Polly down on the kitchen floor. “I didn't realize he believed so strongly. I mean, I knew he was thinking about these things, but I didn't know he'd actually reached the point where he believed.”
Judith sighed. She looked at Naomi and then, quite unexpectedly, leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “But he doesn't. He wants to. He wants to very badly. But he doesn't yet. What David said before? About getting yourself to believe by an act of will? That's what Joel's trying to do. He's in a war with himself, and neither side can get the upper hand. And I can't do anything to help, even though I want to. Because I'm with you. There's no God at all. Or if there is, He's a complete shit and I don't want Him in my house.”
Naomi watched her, smoothly contained, deftly scooping the oranges and pomegranate seeds. “Joel will never speak to me again,” she said fearfully. “He won't, will he?”
“Oh, he will.” Judith smiled. “He has a great capacity for forgiveness.”
She breathed in relief. “So I'll be forgiven?”
“Oh no, Naomi.” Judith suddenly laughed. She picked up two bowls of fruit and walked to the French doors. “Not you.
Himself
He'll forgive himself and you'll be friends again. You wait and see.”
Daniel in the Lions' Den
THEY WENT ON, BUT IN STRAINED, SOMETIMES forced joviality. Joel did not reappear, though at some point he returned to the house and went up the back stairs. The sound of this was covered by David's suggestion that now was a good time to find the afikomen and Hannah's subsequent scurry around the living room. The linen-wrapped matzo, protruding between two Laura Nyro albums, was exchanged for David's crisp five-dollar bill. As soon as she could, Naomi claimed tatigue on Polly's part and took her home.
It was fully night now, and the rain had never quite materialized, which only meant that there was a superfluous fullness to the dark. In her headlights along Goddard Falls Road, an orange chipmunk with a racing stripe suddenly skittered across her path, its tail held straight up like a bumper car attached to nothing, then disappeared into the black field. Polly, who truly was tired now, dropped to sleep in the back seat, and Naomi envied her her oblivion. Oblivion, for herself, would not be easily achieved tonight. She pulled off the road at the top of her drive and got out; then, murmuring, she scooped the little girl against her
shoulder, hitched up the diaper bag, and pulled out her flashlight. Then she shut the car door with her hip and started down.
Her circle of light bounced past trees, the deciduous ones bare even of buds, the pines boasting a powder puff of apple green at the fingertip of each dark, needled finger. The soggy mud sucked as she went down, sending the odd stone clattering before her, and she felt the motion of Polly's jaw, its mime of sucking, against her own cheek. She kept her eyes on the drive only a few feet before her and concentrated on where she was putting her feet. This was how she managed not to see the car, until she was nearly on top of it.
“Hey,” a voice said, at nearly the same instant. The collation of unfamiliar car and familiar voice was paralyzing. Naomi stopped in her tracks. She threw up the beam of light in his face—her first instinct, she would later observe, to be as cruel as possible.
“Hey, get it out of my eyes, will you?”
But she wouldn't. She liked him like this: caught in the headlights, at her mercy. Daniel in the lions' den. This made her the lion, she supposed.
“What are you doing here?” said Naomi.
“You changed the locks. I couldn't get inside.”
“I changed the locks?”
She was incredulous. “Like, over a year ago. Why shouldn't I change the locks?”
“No reason,” said Daniel mildly. “But you asked what I was doing here. I am here, on the porch, as you see, because you changed the locks. Otherwise I would have waited for you inside.” He peered at her. “How come you walked down?”
“I don't trust the drive, Daniel. I never did in mud season, as you know.” She stepped past him and got out her key. “I suppose you're coming in.”
“Yes, I suppose. I've come a long way.”
Naomi opened the door. She turned on the light and stepped in, wiping her muddy boots on the mat in the vain hope that he'd do the same.
“Is that mine?” said Daniel. She looked at him and he nodded toward Polly, who slept on.
For such a consequential question he looked remarkably unperturbed. Daniel's long face was pale but rather dull; his hands were casually stuck in the slack pockets of his blue parka.
“That,”
said Naomi stiffly, “was already six months old when you left town. It's Heather Pratt's daughter Polly. I've been taking care of her.”
He nodded, off the hook and otherwise indifferent. “Fine, fine.”
But this, too, enraged her. “If you'll excuse me, I need to put her to bed.” She walked past him into Polly's room and, under a dim light, deftly changed her diaper and zipped her into her pajamas, all without waking her. Then she lifted Polly into her crib and covered her up with her great-grandmother's quilt.
Coming out of the room, she saw him there, his hands on his skinny hips, still in his parka. The sight of him in what was once this most familiar of places brought home to her quickly how much the house had been changed in his absence—the great room divided into a warren, the white porcelain gleam of the toilet through an open door. There were Polly's things now, too—abandoned stuffed animals and cairns of building blocks here and there. Also, down the brand-new stairs, the annex with its computer and television. He frowned at this.
“I see you put in a bathroom,” Daniel observed, pursing his mouth. The black hair of his mustache, she suddenly noticed, was faintly gray.
“Yes. And an annex for my work. Business,” she said gratuitously, “is going well.”
“Business was always important to you, Naomi,” her ex-husband commented. She half expected him to break into a wail, à la Jacob Marley:
Mankind was my business!
Instead, he went to the couch and sat, shrugging off his parka. “I'm glad to be inside.”
Naomi stood looking at him. He wore a dirty flannel shirt beneath a dirty sweater—once discernibly blue, now dingy brown—and jeans. His unwiped boots were planted heavily on the light floorboards, shedding bits of mud around them. Had she passed him on a busy street she might have thought that he bore a slight resemblance to Daniel, something vague in the carriage, perhaps, but then it was a common enough look: gangly and hirsute, white-skinned, with a fading hairline and large knuckles. She had lived with him for thirteen years, and now she had no desire even to touch him.
“Want a beer?” Naomi said, more for something to say.
“No. I'll have tea, though. Do you have Lemon Zinger?”
Right where you left it, she thought. She went to put the kettle on.
“I've been here for a couple of hours,” he called from the next room. “I knew you'd be back. I saw your purse through the window.”
The thought of him looking through her window gave her a chill. “I was at a Passover Seder.”
“A what?
Here?”
“Yeah. A few more of the chosen moved into town after you left.”
“Shit,” he said. “I got out just in time.”
Unexpectedly, Naomi found herself smiling at this. The kettle gave its banshee groan. She brought him his tea.
“Thank you,” Daniel said, and as he took the mug she felt again that stab of the accustomed and had to shake herself to reinsert the missing year between Daniel's departure and Daniel's presence on her couch. “So, you look all right,” he said, blowing on the liquid.
“If that's a compliment, thank you,” said Naomi. She did not return it.
“You got the baby you wanted,” he observed.
“She isn't mine. I told you.”
“You got a boyfriend.”
She looked where he was looking. To her surprise, she saw, crumpled at one end of the couch, Nelson Erroll's undershirt. Unnoticed by Nelson, evidently, and by herself, but not by Daniel. He had always seen the trees rather than the forest.
“No. Not really.”
Daniel smirked and sipped. “And business is good.”
“Yes. It really runs itself, at this point.”
“Like any good collective,” he said, a mite sarcastic.
“Yes.” She was waiting. She wondered when he might get to the point. “You're still in Woodstock? I heard you went to live on Andy Greenbaum's place.”
“Yeah.” Daniel nodded. “But I was in the city last summer. I hooked up with somebody, and we moved back up to Woodstock together.”
She was reluctant to tell him she knew this already, but she tried not to appear too curious, either. It was important to Naomi that he not think she cared, especially since she didn't.
“Her name's Katrina Frosch.”
Naomi crossed her legs. “Didn't she used to live with a guy who used to be a Weatherman?”
“You heard that?” Daniel said with pathetic eagerness.
“Oh, somewhere. So what are you living on, anyway?”
Daniel looked at her steadily. He knew precisely what she was asking,
and she knew precisely how he would answer. “The land, Naomi. We are living on the land.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “All right. So Katrina has a trust fund, I guess.”
Anger swept over his face. “It's all you think about, isn't it? How things get paid for. We have a community in Woodstock. We help each other. Everybody gets along fine.”
“Good,” Naomi said. “You know, we really don't have to fight about this, Daniel. I mean, if we ever did need to, we certainly don't need to now.
He considered this, and backed off. “I'm glad you think so. I really am.” He seemed to ponder his tea. “I want to sell the house, Naomi. Unless you're willing to buy me out, that is.”
For a long minute she wasn't sure she had heard him properly. The words “sell” and “buy” seemed so unnatural in his voice that she wasn't entirely clear on what he meant by them. “Which house?” she finally said.
“This one. The one I built.” He watched her calmly. “It's only fair, Naomi. I know you see that.”
She gaped at him. “Wait a minute. Are we discussing property? As in private property?”
“I built it, Naomi. It's half mine. At
least
half,” he said uncharitably.
“You might have said something earlier. I don't know if I would have made so many improvements to a house I considered half yours. I might have started over in a house that already
had
a bathroom.”
He looked blankly at her. “It's fair, Naomi.”
“What do you need the money for?” she demanded. “What could you possibly need to buy? I thought you all took care of each other down there in Woodstock.”
“I'm going to be a father,” Daniel said. “The baby is due this summer.”
This, as he knew it would be, was stunning. Naomi sat, dimly wondering which of those responses offering themselves she ought to pick: disbelief, denial, bereavement, rage. Or self-loathing, because of the times he had said he did not want children, and how the meaning of that—that he did not want children with
her—
was now so palpably clear. Katrina Frosch was having the baby Daniel would not let her have. The baby scraped out of her years before, in Ithaca, while he waited out in the reception room, flipping through magazines. The baby they had
fought over all their last summer and fall, until he stopped sleeping with her altogether, because, as he said, he didn't trust her. She had followed him here, she had lived in his miserable house without a bathroom down a muddy slope in the woods, and relinquished her friends and everything she might have accomplished by now, and he didn't trust her not to stick an embroidery needle through her diaphragm and get herself pregnant with her husband's child. The baby Polly could never be, because she was Heather's. And now, amid the general loathing she felt for Daniel, there was an ice-clear stab of loathing for Heather, too.
“Well,” she finally said, “I see.” All her energy was directed toward not weeping. Not in front of him. “How unexpected.”
“Not really,” Daniel said proudly. “Katya and I made the decision together. We wanted a child.”
This was so wantonly cruel that she could only glare at him.
“You know what I mean, Daniel. What happened to your stand on overpopulation? What happened to that line about how it was narcissistic to replicate your DNA when there are too many hungry and homeless children? You said having children was a bourgeois gesture in this country, like having a big car, and you wouldn't do it. What happened to that?”
He shrugged. If he had insight into this, he was not moved to share it.
“So you need money.” She sounded, to her own ears, increasingly strident. “You yourself don't care about money, but your child should have some.”
“I don't have to justify this to you, Naomi. It's my life. My life is no longer caught up in your life.”

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