The Sunlit Night (3 page)

The jig is up, I thought, riding the front car of the 11:07 train. We’d finally canceled one another out. It was a two-hour ride back to school. I had one more week of exams. Two months until Robert left for Japan. Four months until the wedding, if there was going to be a wedding. All the sailboats in New England were mounted, dry, along the shore that curved in the train’s eastern windows—boats that would soon be waxed for summer. I wanted to steal a boat. Preferably a houseboat. Someplace where I could live for a while, while my family adjusted.

I wanted to know whose idea all this had been. I wanted to know if my father had been a good kisser. I wanted to know how many men had kissed my mother, and how well. I wanted to know if she planned on kissing new men now. I wanted to know if my mother was a good kisser. I had been told that I was a good kisser, and I wanted to kiss my mother and talk to her about romance.

Sarah and Scott had gone on their first date in October of Sarah’s freshman year. My parents, from the start, found Scott unforgivably un-Jewish, unimaginative, tasteless, sporty, and dull. My sister found his talent for leisure and his lack of anxiety breathtaking (our family loved work, loved anxiety) and spoke to me about his being a “liberated man.” I think it was this very liberation my parents resented. And was my sister liberating herself, then, via marriage?

The conductor came and asked for my ticket. It was a young conductor, his uniform too large for him, and I was crying, and this frightened him. He apologized for asking, waited a second, then asked again. I wanted to make him comfortable—I sat up straight and slapped myself on the cheeks a little and gave him my debit card. He charged me the station price. He apologized again and said that I had saved four dollars. I thanked him and blew my nose in my ticket and turned back to the window. More boats, more houses.

I hadn’t ever made a decision as large as getting married, or getting divorced. I liked to move alone through vast fields or pastures. Throughout college, during the summers, I would find ways for the university to send me somewhere, wherever they were sending people. I went with a small suitcase, to stare intensely at the livestock—Irish sheep, English sheep—paint the animals, and find somebody with a funny foreign name to make love to on a foreign kitchen floor before coming home to my parents’ empty refrigerator.

There would be two refrigerators, surely still empty, humming in the corners of my parents’ separate apartments. They were taking the summer to move out of our old place and find new ones. I wondered if they would eat more without each other. Whether they would grow fatter and happier, or waste away. And why they were doing this, doing it now, after not doing it for so long. An announcement said, “Please take all your belongings with you.” The train pulled into the station with a screech and a thump, marking the last time I would come back to school before it too ended.

•    •    •

I shared a dorm with four girls, most of whom had made some kind of plan. One was accepted into the Yale School of Drama. Another was accepted, together with her high school sweetheart, into the University of Chicago Law School. A third got a job in the offices of Kaiser Consulting.

My father had never worked in an office. In his post-college youth in New York, he ate toasted bagels with his friend Carl at Fanelli’s on Prince and Mercer, got drunk on spiked milk, and occasionally helped his mother package blush behind her makeup counter. His proudest commercial achievement was “making change” (“Do you have to make change?” he asked brightly when I got a high school waitressing job) on his parents’ noncalculating cash register. New York no longer had room for this particular, charming kind of bum.

My friend Igor wrote code for Google. I had recently visited his office for lunch. We’d jumped in ball pits and cruised down the halls on Razor scooters to reach the cafeteria. In the first draft of my cover letter to Google Marketing, I had written about my enjoyable visit to the Google office and “the jazz of the ball pit.” My cousin, a software engineer, suggested I cut this phrase. I rewrote the letter to include the terms
product, content
, and
enable
. My interview gave me an excuse to wear a magenta blazer, but I didn’t get the job.

At the open information session for private equity jobs, I had gotten as far as a pair of giveaway rubber flip-flops and a Rubik’s cube. I had a preliminary interview with the Boston Consulting Group, but I couldn’t say how many dentists there were in America. The interviewer suggested I begin my calculations, next time, with the number three hundred million.

I wasn’t cut out for these jobs. I had been born, as Robert Mason had pointed out, into a desperately artistic family.

Perhaps there were other parts of the world, I thought, where one could make a living as an artist. I sat by the window of the pizza parlor nearest the train station and ate a Grandma slice, trying to imagine the Arctic. Was it yellow up there? Was that what this man’s paintings were all about? I didn’t know what it meant to live in an “artist colony,” and I wondered how many artists there would be. If they were local artists, they would be very good, by now, at painting wide-open spaces. Maybe they could teach me how to paint light. Maybe I could teach them how to paint buildings. Maybe they knew of whole new un-American colors. Colors New Yorkers would want to buy. Colors that came out of that thin northern air. A breeze blew in through the pizza shop’s windows. I put back the oregano. In the computer lab down the street, I found the colony’s invitation halfway down my Gmail trash folder.

It promised to be solitary, and terribly far away. The directions described an eighteen-hour train ride that started in Oslo and connected to a four-hour ferry across a major fjord. It was recommended that I bring gear for heavy storms. The colony denied responsibility for the health and well-being of its tenants. The master painter was not to be held accountable for the artistic progress of apprentice painters. The Norwegian government requested that all international tenants state their purpose to the local police upon arrival. Leaving the colony was possible only when the fjord proved crossable, on select and unforeseeable days.

I asked the Arctic if it would still have me.

A girl named Ingeborg had taken the apprenticeship. The committee did not fail to describe her talent, her cordial personality, and their excitement at the prospect of her joining the Yellow Room project before explaining that she had subsequently declined the position and instead taken an internship at the Norwegian National Gallery.

In the morning, our last roommate, the one who kept track of job offers by sticking Post-it announcements to our suite’s front door, who herself had not yet found a job but would soon become the cactus expert for the Natural Gardener in Austin, Texas, posted a note on the wall with my name and the words
Far North
.

•    •    •

On Graduation Day, my parents arrived with Sarah, who’d flown in from a hiking vacation with Scott’s family. I had never seen either of my parents put their feet into water. I had never seen my father’s calves. My parents liked to be clothed, indoors, and in Manhattan. To the graduation ceremony, my mother wore a royal blue dress with large buttons and black rubber-soled shoes. My father’s tie was brown-red, the color of scabs. I was wearing a cowboy hat with small red berries embroidered around the brim.

I don’t remember the origin of the hat tradition, but all of us graduating had our heads covered: with straw, crowns, helmets, plain yarmulkes, open books tied to the head with ribbon and worn as bonnets. We filled the yard in our folding chairs. My friend Emily was called up onstage to accept the George Andrus Prize for intellectual achievement, character, and personality. Robert Mason was called up onstage to accept the Hart Boell Award for qualities of courage, strength of character, and high moral purpose.

I recalled the bus station where he’d left me. I thought of highways, superbridges, stretched lines, my father’s pencils, my future canvas. All I had was a direction, north.

What did my father have? Saul had the American songbook, the Brooklyn Bridge, his love of babies, and Catherine Deneuve’s chocolate cookie recipe.

My mother, though this was perhaps not a blessing, had a new interior to design. As the honorary degrees were conferred, I pictured my mother living alone. It looked queenly. When I turned around to look for her in the crowd, I saw she had taken a seat behind my father. My mother looked like she could see the whole world from where she sat. My sister sat in the row behind my mother, looking just like her, except pinker in the cheeks. My sister’s focus was narrowing steadily on a single point: Scott Glenny. She and my parents were still barely speaking to one another, overwhelmed by what all three called
disgust
.

Robert came down from the stage and retook his chair, not far from mine. We too looked straight ahead. All the graduates rose and were recognized.

After the ceremony, I packed up my room, keeping only what I’d take north. How hot was an arctic summer? I took both sandals and wool sweaters. I gave shoes and dresses to my sister. I took my necklaces, my brushes, and all my socks. My roommates picked from among my books, and the rest were left outside the library in a cardboard box. It took a long time to make the room really empty. I didn’t know then that I was practicing for a greater emptying, the one I’d perform four months later, when the entire Gregoriov Bakery would need to be closed and cleared. Once my dorm room looked ready for someone else to move in, it was time to go.

We got home and found the sofa bed unmade. My mother, in our previous life, would never have left it this way. Now she flung her handbag onto the heap of blankets, removed her shiny black shoes, and sat on the corner of the bed nearest the window. She leaned her head back, as if in meditation. My sister moved her bag and sat atop the blanket heap. My father sat on the corner of the bed nearest the door. I was left the fourth corner, the one canopied by my mother’s collection of orchids. I slouched under the flowers and found they had no smell. None of us faced each other. For the first time, the thin pull-out mattress seemed large, seemed adequate.

•    •    •

Early in the morning on the first of June, I rode the A train from West 4th Street to JFK. It took an hour and a half; the city’s population boarded and exited the train along the way, and I focused on the presence of so many people, soon to be replaced by artists, mountains, animals. I entered the departures terminal and checked in.

Some people claim that life is not making love to them. My father claimed this. Some people have never been made good love to, or don’t remember, or haven’t been taught how, and cheat their lives out of the pleasure we each can make in one another.

I thought: one must want to make love to life.

From my father, I had inherited a certain amount of discipline. We both could wake early and work intensely for hours. We were both comfortable in our own company. We were not lonely, or lazy. But discipline, I felt certain, had to be paired with joy. Otherwise it went to waste. Waste, like pictures that nobody sees, or waking up early without then slicing your bread, nodding to the weather, and relishing the fabric of your sleeves as you push your arms through.

Lofoten lay some ninety-five miles above the Arctic Circle, a string of six islands in the Norwegian Sea.

I was looking for a love unlike my parents’ love or my sister’s love or the love on a foreign kitchen floor. I wanted my own kitchen to keep clean and full of bread and milk and hot sauce and a big clean empty sink where I could wash my dishes. I wanted to forgive my mother and father for their misery and find myself a light man who lived buoyantly and to be both his light and his dark, serious baby.

•    •    •

Yasha had begun to measure time in bread. The Gregoriov Bakery was in its tenth year. His father had propped up in the store window a “10” made out of a cruller twist and an everything bagel, which he replaced on the first of each month. The stale twists were fed to Septimos, their Brooklyn cat, named after Septimos, their Russian cat. Both cats were black. Yasha’s mother, a piano teacher, had chosen the name in honor of their first cat’s unusual purring: precise musical sevenths. Brooklyn Septimos purred like a normal cat. Yasha had taken to calling him Sam. Yasha could no longer recall, even when he tried, the sound of his first cat’s sevenths. He could recall only the image of Russian Septimos licking his mother’s hands as she played piano. This anniversary would also mark the tenth year since Yasha had seen his mother.

They had been doing all the work without her. Yasha’s primary responsibilities were maintaining the window displays and “customer seduction,” as his father Vassily called it. Vassily knew what he had working in his favor: his son’s natural handsomeness, his store’s plot on central Oriental Boulevard, the age-old significance of bread, the fact that bread went stale and needed replenishing. These were the forces driving his business. He was not driven, himself, to increase the bakery’s sales, especially in this tenth year. Aside from the special window display, the anniversary went uncelebrated. He no longer wanted the bakery; he no longer wanted America. He wanted his wife.

The two Gregoriov men woke each morning, did stretching exercises—Vassily was a proponent of stretching in the morning—and baked. It was Yasha’s senior year of high school and he was the only kid he knew who woke up before five. There was, because of that necessary principle of replenishing, a great amount to bake each morning. Yasha moved the loaves in pairs, from the cooling rack to the window display. The window became a kind of ark, and Yasha sometimes tried to make the twin babkas and Danishes look like mating animals. It was hard to make bread look alive—it had no legs, no face. Yasha had once tried carving a smiley face into a particularly yellow challah. His father had slapped him for making the bread look cheap. Sudden movements, like slaps, or a loaf slipping from Yasha’s hands to the floor, lifted the thin coat of cornmeal from the bakery’s every surface into a brief fog.