Florence Gordon (27 page)

He stood in the wide vaulted doorway and scanned the crowd.

Lev was in the middle of the room, talking to a man she didn’t know.

“That must be your boss,” Daniel said. “I want to tell him what a great job he’s doing.”

Daniel walked quickly toward Lev. How did he even know which one Lev was? Maybe because Lev was obviously the person who radiated authority? Maybe because Daniel had some weird sixth sense? Maybe because Daniel had looked him up on the Internet?

Unlikely. Daniel never looked anything up on the Internet.

She saw herself throwing her body between Lev and Daniel to make sure no one got hurt. Alternatively, she saw herself sprinting out the door and leaving them to their fate. She chose a middle course and just stood there. She wasn’t sure she could have moved even if she’d wanted to. She had the odd feeling that she was watching something that had already happened.

Daniel had joined Lev in the middle of the room. The other man was gone. Daniel was pumping Lev’s hand, and Lev was regarding him with what looked like the usual Levian friendliness. It was impossible to tell if he was in the least uneasy.

Daniel was boring into Lev with a smile the intensity of which Janine wouldn’t have been able to describe. He was standing too close, like someone who lacked the usual social boundaries.

A bearded server blocked Janine’s view, holding out a tray of crackers with dabs of pâté. Janine smiled and shook her head and he moved on, but a moment later someone else appeared—a woman named Greta, a zestful apostle of “learned optimism” whom Janine had met in Pittsburgh.

“You again?” Greta said. “We have to stop meeting like this!”

Janine tried to make conversation with Greta while watching Daniel and Lev.

Daniel normally liked to keep his distance from everybody, but he seemed to be crowding Lev, forcing him back. Lev was taller than Daniel but somehow Daniel was dominating the space.

Daniel was so unlike most of his colleagues on the force that sometimes she liked to tell herself that he was a police officer only in name. But now she was reminded that he had at his disposal a physical vocabulary that was foreign to her own professional world.

Lev was moving backward, but so gradually that she wasn’t sure he was even aware of it. As they spoke, Daniel would move up slightly, and Lev would step back, and then, when his weight was on his back foot, Daniel would move a little closer, so that Lev had to step back again.

A million years ago, Daniel had taken her to a SuperSonics-Bulls game. Everybody went crazy when Michael Jordan dunked the ball and Dennis Rodman snatched rebounds, but Daniel pointed out the more subtle things they were doing: obstructing the path of some hapless SuperSonic before the Sonic even knew where he wanted to go, closing up a lane to make sure that a Sonic had to take his shot from a bad angle. He showed her how good players make lesser players move in the direction of the good players’ choosing.

Off in a corner of the room, there was an upholstered yellow chair.

He’s going to make him sit in it.

The two men were still ten feet away from it, but as soon as she noticed the chair, she knew.

Somehow Janine was still talking to Greta. Remarkable how you can nod at the right places without listening to a word a person says.

She felt as if she should rescue Lev, but she didn’t know what she’d be rescuing him from.

She didn’t want him to sit in the chair. Somehow, sitting in the chair seemed like an awful fate.

Lev had taken two crackers from the server and was holding one in each hand. Now he transferred one of them so that he was holding both in his left hand. With his freed-up right hand he pulled out his wallet.

What the hell was going on?

He was holding out his wallet and trying to take something out of it at the same time, until Daniel finally took the wallet, removed whatever it was, and gave the wallet back. She felt as if she were witnessing a mugging, except that both of them were smiling. She had no idea what was happening until she realized that it was a photograph. It must have been a photograph of his daughters.

Daniel, still smiling, still seeming to be the most pleasant person you’d ever met, was holding the photograph out to Lev, as if he were showing Lev who Lev’s own children were.

For a moment she felt sure he was going to stuff the photograph down Lev’s throat. It was so vivid a premonition that she could see him doing it. It was almost as if the sight of the two men was less vivid than her imaginary picture of them.

Lev was now holding one cracker in each hand again, and you could almost have thought that he was trying to ward Daniel off with them.

Greta had finished saying whatever it was she’d had to say—or so Janine assumed, since Janine hadn’t heard any of it. Now Greta was talking to someone else, and Janine moved over to the bar and ordered a soda so as to appear to be engaged in something while she observed the two men.

They were still—slowly, gradually—moving.

Daniel was still holding the photograph near Lev’s face. She remembered some spy movie she’d seen, where the bad guy slit someone’s throat with a credit card.

They were all the way in the corner of the room now. Lev was standing against the chair. Daniel took one more . . . No, he didn’t take a step. He just leaned.

Lev seemed—or was this in her imagination?—to be swaying. Then, slowly, heavily, inevitably, he went down into the chair.

He looked as if he didn’t quite know how he’d gotten there. He was still holding his two crackers. Daniel was leaning over him.

She saw her husband put the photograph in Lev’s breast pocket and clap him on the shoulder, as if they were the best of friends.

Daniel looked around the room and spotted her and came toward her, smiling, shaking his head.

“Great guy,” he said. “Solid-gold guy. Great sense of humor.”

She felt as if she were being toyed with on some Zen level.

“I’ll see you later,” he said. “Call me if you need a ride back.”

He headed toward the door. She followed him, and once they were in the hall, she grasped his arm.

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

“You know what I’m talking about. What was that?”

“We were just chewing the fat,” he said.

Chewing the fat. A solid-gold guy. He didn’t even sound like himself.

“I just want you to know that I’m not impressed,” she said. “I’m not impressed by your Dennis Rodman bullshit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This alpha-male bullshit. It’s so juvenile. It’s so beneath you. If you thought I was impressed by it, you really don’t know me at all.”

A stillness came over Daniel. His features, which for the last hour had been lit up by a false good humor, finally relaxed, and she saw the face of the man she knew.

“I’m not asking you to be impressed. I’m not expecting you to be.”

He was looking at her directly, running his eyes over her face. She didn’t look away.

What can you say about the face of the man you’ve been married to for twenty-three years? It was a well-lined face, and it wasn’t a face you’d call handsome, but it was a strong face. Usually she thought of it as strong, calm, kind, but she couldn’t see the calmness or the kindness now.

And what, she wondered, could be said about her own face? What did he see as he looked at her?

Without saying goodbye, he walked toward the entrance and into the parking lot. She ran out after him, but once she was there, standing with him at the car, she still didn’t know what she wanted to say. Again they just looked at each other.

“I’ll be heading back on the fifteenth,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

“What are you talking about? I thought we were going to talk about this.”

“We’re talking.”

“I mean I thought we were going to talk it over before we decided anything.”

He didn’t say anything.

He had this habit that had always gotten under her skin. When you said something that didn’t, in his opinion, merit a response, he wouldn’t say anything at all. As you waited for him to respond—you kept thinking he’d respond, no matter how many times he’d done this in the past—your original remark would hang there in the air, and would seem stupider and stupider, even to you.

“When were you planning on telling me?” she said.

“I’m telling you now.”

“So you’re just making this decision for all of us? You’re just going home and expecting that I’m coming back with you?”

“I didn’t say that. Everybody’s free here. You’re a free woman.”

He got into the car and closed the door, and then he was gone.

Janine got a ride back from the conference. It was almost midnight by the time she put her key in the lock.

She could hear Daniel’s snoring all the way from the foyer. She’d kept urging him to get tested for sleep apnea, but he kept putting it off.

She hadn’t been able to pay attention to anything anybody’d said all day, and she was still agitated and unhappy.

During much of the day, she’d been thinking that she should just get rid of both of them, Daniel and Lev, find a room of her own somewhere, and spend the rest of her days in a state of wise and noble manlessness. Fish without a bicycle, etc.

But that wasn’t really her. It was nice work if you could get it, but it wasn’t her.

Emily was in the living room, on her laptop.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. Wandering the web.”

Janine sat across from her. She couldn’t remember when she and her daughter had last spent time alone.

“How’s your summer been?” Janine said.

“How has my summer been,” Emily said.

“Yes. I’m asking you a simple question. How has your summer been?”

“It’s been fine. I’m getting to know the grandma.”

“Do you still think she’s just an old windbag?”

“Did I say that? Yeah. No. She’s not an old windbag. She’s the warrior from the Bronx.”

“Have you learned anything from her?”

“Have I learned anything from her?”

“Don’t just repeat everything I say to make me feel stupid. Answer my questions.”

“You know that saying ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer—’”

“‘Everything looks like a nail.’ Sure.”

“Grandma’s a woman with a hammer. Maybe there’s a lot she doesn’t get. Maybe there’s a lot she doesn’t see. But she’s not your average lady.”

“Anything else going on?”

The lights in the room weren’t strong enough for her to be sure whether Emily was blushing.

“I don’t know. Not really.”

“Not really?”

Emily was silent.

“Is there a boy?”

Emily was silent.

“Is there?”

“There was a boy,” Emily said.

“I didn’t even know.”

“Some things are unknowable,” Emily said.

“Did you end it? Did he end it?”

“I did it all by myself.”

“How do people break up these days? Do you just change your status on Facebook?”

“That’s right. That’s how I let him know. I blocked his tweets.”

“No. Really.”

“You know me, Mom. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I let him know by carrier pigeon.”

“Was it hard to break up?”

“Is it ever not hard?”

Janine was wondering where her daughter had acquired such wisdom. Or maybe it wasn’t wisdom. Maybe it was something everybody knew.

“I’m sorry,” Janine said.

“It wasn’t as hard as it could have been, because I studied the master. I studied the art of the hammer.”

“You watched your grandmother break up with someone?”

“I just imagined how she’d do it. I started calling him by the wrong name.”

That was all she was going to get out of her daughter. Janine keenly wished her son were there with them—her voluble son, who would tell you everything that was on his mind whether you wanted to hear it or not, and whose talkativeness somehow freed everyone else to talk more. When he was seven or eight he’d sometimes come into Janine and Daniel’s bedroom in the morning and say, “Can I chat with you for a minute?” and if they said yes, he would slide between them and tell them about everything that was going on in his world: the latest battles of his Lego armies; his latest reflections about
Star Wars;
his critiques of all the kids in his class.

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” Janine said. “Are you okay?”

“I am. Thanks, Mom.”

At her bedroom door, Janine stopped and turned around and said, “What
was
his name, by the way?”

Emily smiled. “You couldn’t pronounce it,” she said.

“That’s . . . what?
Star Trek
?
Friday Night Lights
? Jane Austen? It’s from
some
thing, right?”

“You’re getting there, Mom,” Emily said. “You’re getting there.”

Daniel’s snoring filled the room. Usually, when he was snoring like this, she prodded him onto his side, a position in which he snored a little less, but now she just let him go on.

She’d been angry at him all day, but it’s hard to be angry at someone who’s asleep.

She still couldn’t be sure what he knew or didn’t know. She wished she could just peer into his mind. It was even possible, for all she knew, that he was upset because of something he hadn’t even told her about, and his antics in the morning had had little to do with her.

It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

Early in their marriage, she’d had to train herself to respect his privacy. She’d always been a snoop, so it was difficult, but she’d succeeded in curbing her impulses. It had been years since she’d gone through any of Daniel’s things in search of clues about his inner life.

She went quietly to his dresser and picked up his cell phone. She scrolled through the list of calls he’d made and calls he’d received, and none of it seemed revealing. She checked his voice mail for saved messages, but there weren’t any.

Also on the dresser was a stack of papers: bills, receipts, torn-out pages on which he’d scrawled whatever you scrawl on torn-out pages. The light from the street was enough for her to see by. She picked up his Visa bill. Nothing unexpected. They were still paying off Emily’s braces, somehow, and they were still paying Mark’s bills from Reed and Emily’s from Oberlin. It depressed her to look at the bills.