The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (7 page)

“You’re late,” she said.

I looked down at my watch. I was still five minutes early.

“I’m sorry, madame,” I said, bowing my head just slightly. “But my chauffeur had a terrible time finding the house. I would fire him, but he is after all just a monkey, and you know how they can be.”

“Henry?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

She shook her head, as if to say
I understand, more than you can ever imagine, just how difficult a monkey chauffeur can be.
This was not, of course, the only time I had pinned something on a monkey.

“My mom said you should wait in the living room,” Naomi said.

She turned and darted up the stairs two at a time. As she did, the braids in the back of her hair bounced off her billowy Afro.

This was the first time I had ever been in Judith’s living room, although I had seen fractions of it dozens of times before. At night, the heavy red curtains that draped over the front windows were pulled back far enough to allow more than a peek into the living room. It was the same thing with all of the other newly refurbished houses in the neighborhood; curtains provocatively peeled back to reveal a warmly lit room with forest green couches, modern silver lamps that craned their necks like swans, and sleek glass coffee tables with fresh flowers bursting on top. There was something about affluence that needed exposure, that resisted closed windows and poor lighting and made a willing spectacle of everything. The houses invited, practically begged and demanded, to be watched. When I took my walks at night, this was what I did. I stared into the living rooms of others. I stood across the street on the tips of my toes and tried to catch a glimpse of the kitchen, or the dining room, or the paintings on the wall. Kandinsky and Rothko prints over the sealed-up marble fireplaces; long, elegant dining tables made to look as if they had been hand-carved out of a single block of wood; walls that were painted a subtle shade of gold that was perhaps picked up by the massive vase of plastic sunflowers in the corner. Rarely did I ever see the people who lived in those houses, as if each were merely display-case props of revitalization. Sometimes I thought of what I was doing as window shopping.

An old record player and radio the size of a desk, made of wood and with a dozen chrome knobs, sat in the hallway. The living room had a heavy black wall-mounted phone from the early twentieth century, and a silver clock stuck permanently on two-twenty. The leather couches, chestnut colored and densely packed, were separated by a wooden coffee table that had at least fifty small drawers along its side. It was all so solid, comfortable, and familiar, as if Judith had deliberately picked only pieces of furniture that had proven their ability to withstand time.

From somewhere in the house, Judith called out, “I’ll be right down. I just have to finish something up.” Behind her voice I could hear Naomi’s barely restrained cries to be left alone. In one of those rooms upstairs, Judith was pulling away at her daughter’s hair, while her daughter was pulling away from her mother’s confused, desperate hands. It was a subtle negotiation of unspoken differences.

When the two of them came down the stairs fifteen minutes later, each looked spent and frustrated. Naomi’s hair was now all in braids, more or less evenly separated. She led the way, with her mother just a step behind. Judith was wearing her glasses, which gave her small, narrow face an added sense of depth that seemed to be previously missing.

“I’m sorry we kept you waiting so long. Naomi and I had some unfinished business to settle.”

We kissed each other on both cheeks. Judith’s hand lingered for what I thought was a second beyond polite on my back.

“You’re the first dinner guest we’ve had in our new house.”

“Well, I feel honored.”

“You should. Naomi hates having other people in the house.”

“Is that true, Naomi?”

Naomi was standing pressed against the wall with her hands tucked behind her.

“Yup,” she said.

She popped her lips hard on the “p” for emphasis as she rocked back on her heels.

“You’ve got good taste for someone your age,” I told her.

Judith led me to the dining room, which was still overrun with boxes of books that she said she didn’t know what to do with. Most of them, she said, were terribly boring academic books that she didn’t want to think about or look at anymore. In another life, she had been a professor of American political history.

“And for a while, it was great,” she said. “I loved it. The students, the summers off. I could pick Naomi up from school every day. And at night I still had the energy to go out for dinner or watch a movie.”

“What happened?” I asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “That life seems so far away now. Naomi’s father left. That didn’t help. We moved from Chicago to Boston to Virginia, and now here. Nothing felt good enough anymore.”

She had the habit of tucking and untucking her hair from behind her right ear as she spoke. She hesitated for a few seconds before speaking again.

“Suddenly I saw myself twenty years in the future saying the same thing over and over to students who stayed the same age, and I couldn’t believe that this was what I had planned on. It’s hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It’s nice to think there’s a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that’s not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives. How did you get to own a grocery store?”

“Some people are just lucky,” I said.

“Is that what that was?”

“It also helps if you don’t care where you land.”

Instead of sitting at the dining-room table, Judith suggested we eat on the couch.

“We can be less formal that way, don’t you think?” she said.

I nodded my head in agreement. We ate our dinner off porcelain plates with gold-trimmed edges while sitting on the leather couches. Judith and Naomi were spread out on one while I sat across from them with my food delicately balanced on my lap. I watched every bite as it traveled from the tip of my fork into my mouth. I tried to erase any sound of food being ground into bits by chewing slowly, but it was never quite enough. I was still there, with all of my flaws, in Judith’s immaculate living room, which was larger and grander than anything I had ever sat and eaten in since coming to Logan Circle. I kept my legs close together and limited my movements to a few simple nods of the head. My plate teetered on a few occasions, and had it fallen on the newly restored hardwood floors, I’m confident I would have shattered with it.

We ate in silence for several minutes, the only sounds being those of our forks scraping gently against the plates. Finally Judith made a desperate attempt to overcome the sudden silence.

“Did you ever get to read Ralph Emerson or Alexis de Tocqueville?” she asked.

“A little,” I said.

“Years ago,” I added a moment later to cover up the lie.

“Americans hate history,” she said. She began to lecture then about Emerson and Tocqueville, about America’s repudiation of history and its antipathy toward anything that resembled the past. Her eyes trailed off to a corner of the living room, where they stayed locked. She spoke eloquently and passionlessly, her words probably repeated a hundred times over the years in front of crowded classrooms. She wasn’t speaking to me or Naomi but to the room, which needed to be filled with at least one of our voices. I nodded my head and listened attentively, trying to find a narrow gap in which I could insert a well-timed grunt of agreement.

“We always want to believe that we’re the first to do anything,” she continued. “We’re always racing something or someone, even if it’s all just in our head. We raced across America to get to the Pacific, and then we raced to build a railroad to connect it all. We raced to the moon. We raced to build as many bombs as was humanly possible. I wonder if now we haven’t run out of things to race against. I think the moment that happens, we’ll have nothing to do but look back. Then we’ll know if it was worth it.”

Naomi was leaning against her mother’s legs, which were folded up on the couch specifically for that purpose. She was bored and staring at her fingernails. She chewed on the corner of her index finger while Judith talked. I wondered how many times she had heard this before, if she could repeat it word for word if asked.

“I should have taught a class called ‘Races.’ It could have been great.”

“It’s still not too late,” I added.

“No. It is. I have a year-long sabbatical that I’m already halfway through and I can’t see myself going back.”

Naomi, who hadn’t spoken throughout Judith’s condensed lecture, finally found an opening to jump in.

“You should get a job,” she said. “You could work at the store with Mr. Stephanos.”

“But then what would he do?”

“He could watch me.”

Judith leaned over her knees and wrapped her arms around Naomi’s neck. I tried to look away as she did but instead caught her eyes staring at me from the side. It was my first victory of the evening.

“That doesn’t sound too bad to me,” I said.

After dinner Judith offered me a tour of the house while Naomi prepared for bed.

“It was amazing what this place looked like when I bought it. Parts of the floor were missing; most of the paint had fallen off; almost every window had a crack in it.”

Every floor of the house had been meticulously restored. The second had been turned into a bedroom for Naomi, and a massive library and TV room; the first, into the living room and dining room we had just left. It was just as the construction workers had said. There were sliding doors over the built-in bookshelves that lined the walls, and on every floor there was a bathroom.

“They’re for Naomi,” she said. We were on the top floor, and Judith had just pointed to the fourth and last bathroom.

“We used to have these terrible fights. They only got worse after her father left. She hated both of us for that, but I was the only one around for her to take it out on, which made her hate me even more. We would fight and she would lock herself in one of the bedrooms for hours at a time. There was nothing I could do to get her out. A couple of times I left her alone and she ended up running away from the house. She never went far. I actually found her once in a closet right by the front door. But still, I always went mad trying to find her. I pictured her hurt or kidnapped, or some other awful thought that I couldn’t fight back, and I would take off running, but I guess you already know that part.

“I made a promise to her when we moved here. I told her she could have all the space she wanted. In return, she had to promise to stop running out of the house when she got upset. Now, when she gets mad, she can lock herself on any floor of the house and never have to worry about seeing me, or anyone else.”

She smiled, and then laughed a little, holding her hand to her mouth.

“I know this sounds ridiculous. But it works, most of the time, and right now that’s all I really care about. This is our third house in as many years, and if it took a half-dozen bathrooms and as many floors to make it work, that’s what I would have done.”

I couldn’t help but admire Judith’s devotion to her daughter, precisely because of its excesses. Who didn’t want to be loved like that? She didn’t apologize for anything, and I believed her completely when she said she would have built half a dozen bathrooms if needed. But it wasn’t just because she wanted to make Naomi happy. All you had to do was look at her eyes for a few minutes to see how tired and full of regret she was. She wanted peace; a hundred extra feet of plumbing were surely worth that.

“This must sound ridiculous to you,” she said.

“Nope,” I said. I popped my “p” just as hard, if not harder, than Naomi had done earlier. It was a silly thing to have done, but it made Judith laugh with relief, which was more than I could have hoped for. This time, instead of covering her mouth with her hand, she stretched out her fingers and without thinking took two of mine in hers. She leaned in just far enough for me to meet her face less than halfway. It wasn’t a kiss so much as it was a gentle press, or an extended graze of lips, full of a sudden, almost crushing tenderness. We held it for as long as we could, three, maybe four seconds at most, and then the moment passed.

Judith took a slight step back and said, “I should go check on Naomi.”

“It must be getting late,” I said.

“I’ll walk you to the door,” she said.

She walked me to the door and leaned her head outside so she could see my building.

“Get home safely,” she said.

“I’ll try.”

Less than a minute later and I was climbing the steps to my own apartment. There hadn’t been enough space between her house and mine for me to linger over the evening. Within a few minutes I was struggling to fit my key into my door, since the light on the landing had burned out months ago and no one had ever thought of replacing it, and then I was turning the knob and leaning into the door, which always creaked as if it were about to fall off its hinges. When I turned the living-room light on and stared into my apartment, an inevitable sense of regret swept over me. How much better would it have been to have spent even just a few minutes walking in the cold? Or to have sat on the stairwell in the pitch black, unable to see my hand in front of my face? There I could have replayed pieces of our conversation, reenacted our gestures, imagined alternatives. In the harsh light of my apartment, there was only room for practical concerns. The entire place was shabbier, smaller, and more desolate than I remembered, as if while I was eating dinner someone had entered my apartment and stolen a few years off the furniture. The only thing that wasn’t scavenged from the trash was a solid oak desk that I had saved for three months to buy. Everything else bore the stamp of too many lives and too many people. The couch was draped with a heavy navy blue fabric I had bought from a garment store to cover up the unknown stains and worn armrests. The coffee table was balanced by a stack of magazines on one side and an old bowl on the other. The rug in the center of the room had been left by the previous tenant, who had most likely inherited it from the tenant before him. The ends were so frayed that at least twice a month I had to trim a piece off to keep from tripping on the loops of extended thread. Five years later now and one end of the rug was noticeably longer than the other; the corners had been rounded off, and then cut like a pie sliced into at odd, uneven angles. The television had knob dials and terrible reception, and it sat on an old trunk that looked solid from a distance, but was in fact practically paper thin. A man, I told myself, is defined not by his possessions but by the company he keeps. That was a phrase I had stolen from my father, along with this: the character of a man is like the tail of a monkey; it is always behind him. I knew from experience that moments of sorrow and self-pity were the best times to think of these old phrases and axioms. Not because they provided any comfort, but because, like any other deliberate act of memory, they could supplant the present with their own incorrigible truth.