The Grief of Others (3 page)

Now he glanced to see who it was, and flipped it open.“Hey.”

His wife. No preamble. “Upper Nyack called.”

The elementary school. “What’s up?”

“They wanted to know if Biscuit’s all right.”

“They couldn’t ask her?” He aimed for Groucho Marx, even as he felt the sinking in his gut.

“John, she skipped again. Do you think you could get over to the house?”

John refrained from sighing into the phone. This was their daughter’s fifth unexcused absence this year, her third since winter break alone. They’d been called in to discuss the matter last month, after the most recent incident. He and Ricky had sat down with the principal, Biscuit’s teacher, and the school guidance counselor, and they’d had a lengthy, convivial, and unilluminating conversation, not so much about Biscuit as about curricular benchmarks, hormones, childhood depression, pharmaceutical research, and the works of Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and Rachel Simmons.The meeting had ended with John feeling touched by the concern of the school personnel, Ricky seething at what she characterized as their prepackaged condescension, and neither of them one whit closer to understanding what was going on with their daughter.

John was baffled. All he could think was that Biscuit seemed awfully young to have truancy issues. When he’d been ten he would no more have thought of playing hooky than robbing a bank. “Did you try calling the house?”

“I did.” Her brevity told all.

Still, he hesitated.

“Do you think you could drive over?” she asked again; he could hear her working to make it a request.

Now John did sigh. He looked at the glistening paintbrush in his hand. The four students in the scene shop with him, currently applying soy-based theater paint to a dozen flats, would be unable to go beyond that task without his guidance. He’d counted on cutting the brick wall out of Styrofoam this afternoon. It would take at least an hour and a half to go home, register his and Ricky’s concern with Biscuit, and make it back to campus. And it wouldn’t be fair to the students, who were required to work in the scene shop for course credit, to ask them to rearrange their schedules and come back later in the day. Which meant he’d wind up giving them credit for hours worked, while he himself would cut and paint the wall alone tonight. In fact, despite the relative minimalism of the set, and the fact that John was largely recycling an old design (
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
was a perennial favorite at Congers Community College; this was its second production during his short tenure there), the opening was only four days away, so he could pretty well prophesy at least one all-nighter in his immediate future.

When John first met Ricky Shapiro, when they’d first begun dating, it had not been uncommon for him to spend entire nights in the theater. Back then he’d earned a living (after a fashion, Ricky would qualify) teching professional shows at Broadway and regional theaters. He had many happy memories of her visiting him at work on a set after midnight, when the world at large was dark and oblivious, and all light, all life seemed temporarily concentrated within whatever minor world he was constructing. She’d bring in food and they’d sit at the edge of the stage together—he in his painty, sawdusty clothes, she looking so clean and smelling so good—with little white cardboard take-out containers spread out around them. Their love had sprung up, taken root, and run rampant in half-realized forests and tenement houses, castles and kitchens, drawing rooms and hospital rooms, and once in heaven, and once in Denmark.

Back then Ricky—a freshly minted financial engineer (a “quant,” as they called themselves, as she called herself, with a kind of utilitarian pride), not long out of graduate school and playing her new role to the hilt in hose and pumps, pencil skirts and tailored shirts—had been captivated by all his tricks of the trade: how you’d mix perlite (the tiny white balls in potting soil) with paint in order to bring texture to an interior surface; how you’d spray a little paint on the artificial flora, in order to pull it into the world of the show; how, for a big backdrop, you’d spray fixative on charcoal, then tint it and build up a few layers of paint to give it the depth and richness of an oil painting. She’d loved the lingo of the scene shop: scumble painting, scenic fitches, pounce wheels. She’d loved the tools of his profession, from flogger to feather duster, chicken wire to Cellupress; even the most banal piece of equipment—the hair dryer he’d use to quick-dry a patch of paint in order to check the end color—fascinated her in its theatrical context. With a kind of busybody intensity he found sexy, she’d insist he describe to her, in detail and in language she could understand, exactly what he was working on, on a given night, and why he was going about it in that particular way.

“All make-believe,” she would say. “All this for just pretend.” Her tone of wonderment at once paying tribute and poking fun.

“But this stuff is real,” John would counter, rapping his knuckles against the wooden brace holding up a painted storefront, fingering a sharktooth scrim. “Your stuff’s pretend.”

“My stuff!”

“What are derivatives? Stuff you can’t touch. Futures. Swaps. Forwards. Backwards.”

“There’s no backwards, smart guy.”

“Oh, no?”

“No . . . oh.”

Already he’d have turned her around, positioned her tight against his hips, begun to peel her skirt up slowly from the hem.

The truth is he’d never been particularly interested in her world. Volatility arbitrage had sounded exotic—hell, had sounded hot—when first she’d uttered it, tucking a piece of hair primly behind her ear as she did. And it was a rush when he’d realized how flat-out smart she was, how quick and sharp, in a way he’d never be; her interest in him seemed to confer on him a sort of attractiveness he hadn’t suspected he possessed. But in another respect, although John avoided thinking of it in such terms, he found Ricky’s profession beneath him. He thought of her and all her ilk—not only other quants but the whole phylum: investment bankers, hedge fund managers, speculators, riskmanagement analysts—as so many self-absorbed children playing an elaborate game of make-believe, running around dressed in the costumes of power brokers, issuing decrees in gobbledygook, trading promises like wads of play money. Sipping air from plastic teacups. Although he was both too considerate and too uncertain of this view to voice these impressions outright, his general opinion of her field was not exactly a secret. Even before their marriage it had begun to show.

As for Ricky, what had started as genuine interest in John’s work transformed over time not into feigned interest but frank resentment. At first, and really, all throughout Paul’s toddlerhood, she’d continued to be at least nominally supportive. If she’d tolerated John’s late nights and sporadic employment with more stoicism than grace, she’d made only the occasional, concertedly factual observation of the strain it put on her. After Biscuit was born, however, Ricky had put her foot down and John had given up this work, with its gypsy schedule and irregular paychecks.

In fact, John knew the phrase “put her foot down” did Ricky a disservice—for any number of reasons, one being she had
not
actually put her foot down but merely registered her preference; another being John had not been unhappy to accept the job at Congers Community College’s Llewellyn-Price Theater. The Llewellyn-Price, a five-hundred-seat performance center, was used (or “utilized,” as CCC brochures unfailingly put it) not only for campus productions but also by amateur and professional groups from around the county. John, whose official title for the past nine years had been Lecturer in Theater Design, taught one course each semester covering the basics of stagecraft and lighting; managed the scene shop; designed sets for a fourshow season; helped supervise the student work crews; and served as technical consultant for outside groups using the space. An insane job.Which he did not pretend not to love.

This was precisely what complicated matters on the phone now with his wife. Ricky, who for the past three years had headed the research group of Birnbaum and Traux in White Plains, hated her job as passionately and openly as he loved his. The work itself had once captivated her: the search for patterns in apparently random systems, the idea that one could forecast future volatility, devise models of what was “true in expectation.” It wasn’t simply that she’d loved the notion of hidden order, of discernible outcomes. It was that she’d cast her lot with it, banked on its existence. It was almost not too much to call it her principles, her faith.

When they first met, Ricky’d been contemplating going for a doctorate in the philosophy of mathematics. Sometimes John wondered, with a kind of confused, guilty perturbation, how things might have turned out if she’d gone this route. She’d have been happier, he supposed. They might all have been. Even if it meant they’d still be paying off student loans, renting instead of owning, borrowing instead of investing. He couldn’t help his rather embarrassingly rosy image of what their life would have looked like then—chillier house, older cars, rattier sweaters, more pasta, less steak: happier.

At the beginning of the economic crisis, and during the long plummeting months of recession, he’d lived with the fear that she would lose her job. Daily he rehearsed receiving the news, offering consolations, making adjustments, weathering loss. The dread was a pressure in his chest, a gnawing in his bones. His very teeth ached with it.Yet when things began to bottom out, when the layoffs tapered off and the market began to evince feeble signs of life, he was aware of a bashful, bewildered disappointment. They had been left unscathed, untested. Only then did he wonder if such a test might have been their saving grace, the very thing that would have shaken them awake, restored to them their vitality, their happiness. Like that summer at Cabruda Lake, when, tested, they’d risen admirably to the occasion, surprising themselves a little, discovering within their relationship something heartier, at once more stalwart and accommodating than they’d known.

Ricky never complained about what she did, the work itself, but she griped volubly about the accoutrements of her job: the twice daily commute across the bridge; the fact that she had to leave the house each morning before the rest of the family was awake and arrive home each evening too late to cook dinner; the fact that she had to wear “clothes,” as she put it (she had a special, contemptuous way of pronouncing the word in this context); and, perhaps most of all, the fact that she earned three times as much as her husband, making her job pretty much unquittable. John knew all of this, including the fact that the last part was not, strictly speaking, true, that Ricky could quit if only he were willing to do something that paid more. That this was a possibility they had never properly discussed loomed over him at all times.

It was because he lived in trepidation of such a discussion, because he lived with the burden of his unspoken (by either of them) indebtedness, that he knew he would give in to Ricky’s current request: would go to the house, check on Biscuit, and scold her in some weary fashion, even though he felt there was little to be achieved by such a gesture. And because he knew, and knew Ricky knew, that he would ultimately give in, John took a moment to dispute the necessity.

“You don’t think it can wait?” He spoke softly, angling his body so that its bulk afforded him some privacy from the students. “I mean, we’ve all been here before. What am I even going to say? That we haven’t already said.”

Ricky sipped in a quick breath. Clearly she’d prepared her answer. “It sends a message, though. If you go home now. If we confront—sorry, if
you
confront her right away. Then at least she gets a sense of the urgency. That we’re not taking this lightly.”

“Yeah.” He stroked some paint across the top of the stretched muslin, using up what was already on the brush. “You’re right.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Yeah, but—thanks, John.”

He slipped the phone back in his pocket. It wouldn’t be so bad, returning later tonight. Lance Oprisu, the Llewellyn-Price’s technical director, who ordinarily bore chief responsibility for executing the sets that John designed, was on leave this semester, which had turned out to be both burden and blessing. Although John’s workload was more stressful, he had found the increased solitude, the sheer number of hours he’d been spending alone now in the theater, welcome. Tonight he’d have the scene shop to himself, a ready supply of Diet Coke from the vending machine down the hall,The Doors blasting on the stereo, and no students around to mock, however affectionately, his musical tastes. He knew when he got in the right groove he could work solo with as much efficiency as an entire crew of students. Nor would it be awful to spend a night out of the house. He set the brush across the top of the paint can and turned around to face the students, none of whom looked up.

Amy and Pureza were working, minimally, on a single flat; mostly they seemed to be deep in conversation, Pureza doing the majority of the talking, Amy murmuring at intervals,
“Claro. Claro, que sí.”
Iryna wasn’t working on the set at all, but applying color to her face instead, from a seriously impressive eye shadow kit; at a glance it contained some twenty cakes of color. Vivi was wearing red earbuds and grooving to whatever music she was absorbing through them, but she had, bless her heart, finished one flat already and was halfway through her second.

“Ah, people,” said John. His inclination was to say, “You guys,” but he had learned that this didn’t go over well with his students, predominantly female, first-generation college students, almost a third of them first-generation Americans. Addressing them as “women” seemed too stiff, “ladies” too sexist, “folks” too grassroots, and “kids” too insulting. So: “People?” said John again, louder, and they turned to him. He waited for Vivi to remove one earbud. “I’m going to have to take off early today. I’d like you to finish up these flats, but then you can go. It’s my screwup, not yours, so you can still sign the crew sheet for two hours. Iryna.”