Among the Ten Thousand Things (21 page)

Deb and Jack were still on the bed, still around their daughter. The first moment of levity had come in the form of the cat, of Wolf, who’d filled a quiet moment when Kay was all cried out, trilling strange meows from the closet. Jack had gone over and hovered his hands over the small gray body. “Not gonna hurtcha.” He’d swept forward—something balletic in the way it was all one motion—and scooped the cat up around the middle, where its arched back made a handle for holding. Kay had smiled a little then, and her father had pounced, saying, “He wants to know what all the hubbub’s about out here. Thought maybe he heard a can opener.”

Yes, fathers have a way with daughters.

“Hey, what do you want to do today?” he asked. “It’s going to be beautiful out, beautiful day. We’ll get pancakes. Sun’ll be shining, we can go out on the water. That sound good?”

“Good,” said Kay, who noticed her father kept using the word
we.

Deb had noticed it too, and that Jack had put his hand over hers on the hill of their daughter’s hip.

Simon and Teagan slept an hour or two, or he slept them. Everything was changed from before; of course it was. The mattress so sinking he could feel the bones of it. She rewrapped her fingers around him, held him so tightly he felt pressed past her. He tried looking down, but her head was tucked high under his chin.

“I’m hot.” He felt his heart against her, how it wanted to beat her away. “You hot?” He rolled off the bed and went to the window. “Probably from all the covers.” Flattening his hands against the glass.

“Just, please,” she said, and nothing followed it.

“Hang on—here.” He pushed but the frame stayed stuck to the sill. His palms slipped and skidded squeaking up the glass.

Teagan made a soft wilting sound behind him. “There’s a thing.”

There was a thing, a little white lever in the middle of the frame, which revealed itself to him now. He flipped it and the window sailed open. “There. Duh.” A portal to the feeble breeze and slightly louder trees.

He wiped his hands on his jeans and found Teagan rolled away, toward the wall. The sheets had rolled with her, baring the longbow of her spine, the white nightgown bunched up around her waist. Sweat sharpened each of the fine, light hairs dusting her back’s lower notches.

“Hey, what?” He knelt down by the bed, pulling her to him. She sat up but wouldn’t look him in the face. “It’s okay. You’ll come to New York, in the fall.” He felt he had only so much love, and for a brief moment, the scales had tipped in her direction. “We’ll go to the Chelsea Hotel,” he invented. “We’ll go to the Statue of Liberty,” where he had never been. “We will. You’ll come stay with me there.”

Then she hugged him, and if she didn’t believe him, at least she was trying to.

When he left, she walked him out, down the stairs in case her mother was around. She even smiled a little, gentling the door open and drawing the beaded curtain aside so he could step out. There, on the welcome welcome welcome, thinking about whether it would be all right to kiss her. He didn’t.

He took the back way, veering onto the street again when he judged himself far enough away. At the point where the hill began, he stopped and looked, the last place he thought he’d be able to see her, ghostly on the porch in her starchy nightgown that filled a little with air. But he could see her, too, hours later, lying awake in the sleep-soaked room he shared with his sister, waiting for morning, and much later, when they’d gone back to New York, and for a long time after that. The little white sheet of her swaying. From the breeze, he thought, or from her feet, unsteady beneath her. And he did not know how he’d been so brave, or so weak, to leave her there.

That afternoon there was beauty in all the upstairs windows. “What did I tell you?” Jack had been bluffing, but Jack had been right. “Weather for allergy commercials.”

They went out. It was a while since Kay had been with both her parents. She walked between them, bookended by them, playing on her mother’s phone.

“I don’t know what you do with that thing,” Deb said, of the phone.

“Falling Gems.”
Kay cupped the screen to see by the shadow of her hand. They passed the shipyard with its fleet of retired-seeming boats, creaking rocking-chair noises against their ropes.

“Maybe I’d like a
Fallen Gem,
” Jack said and smiled, pocketing his hands.

The metal-and-glass jangle of the door brought sound into the room, disturbing the otherwise quiet. The two waitresses were leaning with their elbows up on the bar counter, behind the revolving pastries. Their aprons and order pads made a small heap beside them.

They had the place almost to themselves, just an elderly couple at the booth nearest the bathrooms, and they sat by the window, Kay next to Jack and Deb across. The same rouged-up waitress as last time came with her pots of coffee to claim them.

“How we doing?” she asked, gesturing with the dark globe in her right hand, the coffee level sea-tiding inside.

“Excellent”—Jack leaned in to read the name tag—“Brenda! You know, I had a cousin Brenda, lived in El Dorado, Arkansas. Sweet girl, looked a lot like you too. You ever been to Arkansas?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Well, if you’re ever in need of a body double.”

Brenda smiled and Deb rolled her eyes when she thought Jack could see her do it.

The food came out all at once, dishes pyramided on the hook of Brenda’s arm. “All right, herewego.” All of it, the waffles but also the eggs, the hash browns and the home fries (which apparently were different), everything smelled of maple.

“Fantastic,” Jack said, rubbing together his hands. “This takes care of me, but what are the two of you having?” Brenda laughed. Her perm trembled in ribbony pieces. “Laugh’s the same too,” Jack went on. “It’s uncanny. You
sure
you’ve never been to Arkansas?”

“You really don’t stop, do you?” Deb said when Brenda had walked away, close to floating.

“I’m sorry?”

“I just didn’t think she was your type. Peanut? That looks yum.” Kay, still absorbed in her mother’s phone, had poured half the syrup onto her dark and shining waffles, filling them like an ice cube tray.

“You’re not serious,” Jack said.

“What’s to be serious about? Everything’s great, you’re great. I’m glad you’re great. I’m glad you get to come and be the hero, to the kids, to Gary.”

“Look, can we not do this in front of our daughter, please?”

“Oh, because you’re so good at protecting her.”

“Deborah, I’m begging you—”

A plate landed with a smack facedown on the floor, and it took them each a moment to realize it was Kay who’d thrown it, and another before syrup began oozing out from under its edges, creeping along the floor.

“Kay, we don’t do that,” Jack said.

“I hate you,” Kay said. She said it to her mother.

“Katherine,” Jack started.

“Don’t.” Deb rose. “Let her, it’s fine.” She edged out of the booth. “Please would you just excuse me a minute.” She went outside, chiming the bells again, meandering unstraight lines. Jack and Kay and Brenda with the coffee pot watched her, but Deb, through the window, appeared to be looking for something dropped.

The younger waitress came and cleaned the mess up.

Light spilled through the spotted glass, showing up the fingerprints and days of rain.

And Deb, who knew so much about form, knelt clumsy in the sun and turned away her face.

They went. They were away two weeks.

For eighteen days the apartment sat empty. No light bulbs burned out. The four stone
putti
over the television did not correct themselves, Spring beside Fall, Summer with Winter.

Only the wireless went on, invisibly complicating the air.

Then they came home, to the Ruth-gathered mail and the air conditioner, slowly breaking down.

Jack moved to a larger place in Sunnyside, Queens. Deb moved the bed to the opposite wall.

They stopped being married to each other.

Spring came. The glowing green clock on the oven fell an hour behind.

The girl who wrote the letter, the girl who loved Jack, spent some time in Pasadena, in her childhood home. Then she moved back, became a temp at a LEED-certified skyscraper overlooking Bryant Park, where strangers left sticky notes on her monitor.

New year. Kay spooned all the cookie-dough pieces from a pint of ice cream and tried to cook them. You could still see most traffic signs after you closed your eyes.

The girl who wrote the letter found two books in her temporary desk: a guide to city restaurants and
The Professional Secretary’s Handbook.
Your image is the portrait you present to the people with whom you interact. Avoid continual emphasis on “I.”
There was a rose pressed into the chapter on telecommunications, dried to a chart of time zone changes country to country.

Some April mornings the clouds looked like cottage cheese. There was something very punishing about dry-swallowing pills. Travolta died, in the bathroom, a few feet from her litter box.

At the desk above Bryant Park, the girl who wrote the letter wrote other things, wrote stories about what she had done. She stayed late sending pages to the office printer.

After years in Eli’s Tribeca loft, Deb finally sold the apartment uptown. It was raining the day Katherine flew home from California to clear out her things. Simon waited to meet her on Seventy-second Street, under the patchy shelter of dormant AC units. She came toward him from the west side of the street, skipping a little over real and imaginary puddles. A street vendor barked “
Um
brella
Um
brella
Um
brella” beside a table of phone accessories and pashminas under plastic sheeting.

They went to eat, studied the menus.

“When did you—” Simon made scissors of his fingers and snipped the air around his ears.

“Oh, a little while.” Reflexively touching her head.

A minute later he said, “So I’m thinking, you get the blackened catfish.” Katherine laughed. “And I will have the
broiled calf’s liver,
because that’s got to be good here.”

An old joke between them, something they’d gotten from their father: the idea that all diner menus had to be, in some sense, bluffing. “Wait, what about this though, the scrod?”

“Where are you finding that?”

“The specials? It comes with mushrooms.”

“Comes with—all right, never mind. We’re both getting that. Do you think they’ll have enough back there? Multiple scrods?”

“We’ll ask.”

Katherine paid the bill while Simon plucked dusty mints from the bowl by the register. When she pulled out her wallet, a strip of toilet paper flew out too. The mess of her bag was the first time Simon wondered if her life was not all the things she wanted it to seem.

Outside, the
Um
brella vendor had gone back to being a phone cover and pashmina vendor. He gave them a quick once-over, maybe thought they were together. Lots of couples look related.

On the quiet ride uptown, Simon touched the taxi’s plastic partition. “Ever since we were kids I could never see one of these things without picturing it, like, embedded in my neck, you know?”

The diamond flecks in the sidewalks were never diamonds, and the black spots weren’t dirty gum. Some were, but most weren’t.

In the lobby of their old building, the doorman asked if he could help them. “We live here,” they answered. “Well, we used to,” one said. “We have keys.”

For my parents, as a matter of course

An inevitably incomplete list of inevitably insufficient thanks to:

Noah Eaker, alarmingly insightful editor and jelly-bean benefactor, and everyone at Random House, especially Susan Kamil, Caitlin McKenna, Maria Braeckel, and Janet Wygal.

Elyse Cheney, who went so far above and so far beyond. Also the wonderful Alex Jacobs, Adam Eaglin, Sam Freilich, and Tania Strauss.

Jonathan Safran Foer, impossibly wise, impossibly generous, simply the best.

The remarkable writers I have been lucky enough to call my teachers.

The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House at NYU, and Deborah Landau in particular. Also the Bobst Library, for its late hours and lax policy on outside food.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation, for making my time at NYU possible.

Some of my favorites, for their feedback and my sanity throughout: Austin Bone, Anna Breslaw, Julie Buntin, Rebecca Dinerstein, Jane Esberg, Rafi Ginsburg, Grace Kallis, Tiffany Peón, Sarah Peterson, Jennifer Rice, Nina Rouhani, and Shiva Rouhani.

My family: Robert Pierpont (tireless reader), Bob and Mary Pierpont, Shirley “Baba” Roth, Allan Roth, Doris Garcia, and Diana Garcia. You have given me so much.

And to Claudia Roth Pierpont, the most good. Thank you for always coming to get me.