Between You and Me Page 5

While Al Pacino and his associates plotted to avenge Sonny’s death, Russell popped his head in, saw that the kids were asleep, gave a little wave with one finger, a half-salute that suited his Marine’s cut, and left. Cynthia came in soon after and sat at Paul’s feet. “He’s impossible,” she said. “He always has been.” Paul considered showing her the watch but decided against it. He wanted to believe he really would sell it but couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t just stick it in a dresser drawer and wait for Russell to ask for it back. Did Cynthia find him impossible, too? He would have liked to ask, but it was best to keep quiet, he thought, to remain out of view until her anger subsided. But she glanced up at him anyway. “You,” she said, as if reading his mind, and he braced himself. She let out a heavy breath. “You’re just challenging.” And then she leaned back against his legs.

  Challenges, at least, sometimes brought rewards. He laid his hands on her shoulders and with a thumb worked at a knotted muscle. On TV, criminals cut each other down.

  Nocturne for left hand

  Every night, after the kids have gone to bed, he searches for their shoes. They might be anywhere: under the couch, in the middle of the kitchen floor, on the basement landing, or if it’s warm enough, out on the lawn, damp with dew. This is one of his contributions to the efficient running of the household, maybe his most important contribution, though not the most visible. If anyone has noticed, none has said a word. He performs the task quietly, without announcing himself, and takes private pleasure in knowing how useful he has been.

  He does, of course, have selfish reasons for doing it. To keep the morning from starting with kids shouting up the stairs and Cynthia shouting down, with Joy begging him to drive her to school because she’s missed the bus and doesn’t want to walk, with Kyle saying he hates school anyway and why doesn’t he just drop out and start his own business like his father did. “Your father dropped out of college, not grade school,” Paul told him. “And the only way he started a business was by borrowing money from all his friends and never paying them back.”

  But even more important, he likes the feeling of quiet accomplishment. Neither child has to ask, where are my Keds or my Reeboks or my ballet slippers? After breakfast they just walk into the laundry room and find them lined up beneath their coats, a generous assortment, left foot and right arranged in proper position. The only mornings they miss the bus now are those when Joy spends forty-five minutes in the shower, undeterred by the water going lukewarm and then frigid; or when Kyle, having forgotten to study for a geography test, hides in his closet, or in the basement, or in the shrubs by the back fence, until Cynthia, exasperated, finally cries, “Fine! Stay home and watch the soaps. What do I care?”

  The job is easiest from April through September, when Joy mostly wears sandals or slip-on flats and even Kyle occasionally spends the day in flip-flops. Tonight, though, mid-November, temperature dropping to near freezing, he’s guaranteed to find two pairs of sneakers. The first, Kyle’s high-tops, he discovers quickly enough, toppled against each other beneath the kitchen table, along with three shriveled green beans and a stale challah crust. Locating the second takes more effort. He passes through all the rooms downstairs twice before spotting one of Joy’s running shoes: yellow with blue stripes, poking out from beneath a throw pillow on a living room armchair, where earlier she sat cross-legged, crouched over math homework. Its mate is nowhere in sight.

  He spends another half hour searching, twice creeping into Joy’s bedroom and listening to her sleeping breath until his eyes adjust to the dark. Then he checks around and under her bed, in her closet, and even lifts the end of her blanket to make sure she isn’t still wearing it. Only when he’s ready to give up, to accept the chaos of the coming morning, or else to leave for work before anyone else wakes up, he thinks to look in her backpack. And there it is, along with her math homework, a sheet of meticulously written long division problems, three digits into four, extensive strings of decimals. He doesn’t wonder how the shoe got in there but whether the kids are aware of his efforts after all, whether they intentionally set up obstacles for him. And if so, are they impressed by his persistence?

  The real challenge with sneakers, however, isn’t tracking them down. It’s that neither kid unties the laces before kicking them off. And though Kyle quit Cub Scouts after a year and Joy refused to even consider joining the Cadettes because their uniforms, she said, were “utterly demoralizing,” what experts they are at knot-tying. Double, triple bows, pulled so tightly it’s hard to distinguish one strand from another. He imagines how they must strain when yanking those loops away from each other, the laces resisting, the muscles of their forearms clenching, fingers holding the red impression of woven cotton and nylon. His own fingers ache as he sits on the couch working at each knot in turn. He has let his fingernails grow long enough that he has something to pick with, and sometimes he uses the tip of a pen or the tine of a fork for leverage.

  Tonight Joy’s laces, hideously chartreuse, come free without much trouble. But Kyle’s might as well be welded. Again he wonders if the children know what they’re doing, if they have conspired to make things difficult: tonight you hide yours, Kyle might have said to Joy, and I’ll make impossible knots in mine. But he knows they are as conscious of others’ work on their behalf as they are of gravity. And he knows, too, that it’s better this way. Obliviousness to the lives of adults is the gift of childhood, its crucial freedom. It has taken him three years of step-parenting to understand this, or to stop resisting it, and now he has come not only to accept but to savor it, wishing he could preserve their freedom forever.

  So he wrestles with Kyle’s laces, digging, tugging, teasing. He gets part of one loop free, but then something catches, and he has to ease it back and try a different angle. From upstairs comes the sound of the sink, Cynthia getting ready for bed. Outside, the first flurries of the season bounce against the window. The lace tangles. He feels sweat sliding down his sides. His knuckles grow stiff. He reminds himself that he should buy replacement laces, stock up with every color and length. If he had a pair now, he’d cut the goddamn things off and start fresh. But all he can do is keep pulling, as patiently as possible, while big wet snowflakes catch light from his lamp on their descent.

  Old What’s His Name

  1985

  Paul waited as the image slowly emerged. Here was the backyard, a late summer afternoon, idealized inside a white frame. Cynthia, in shorts, hair loose to her shoulders, was frozen mid-hop above a shovel, the muddy start of a flower bed just visible beneath her feet. Kyle sat on the lowest porch step and held a leash, at the end of which Franklin slept on a bumpy rock. Joy, in full pubescent awkwardness, head teetering on gangly body, braces reflecting sunlight, picked at a freckle on her arm. And out of sight, behind the Polaroid, Paul sat in a canvas chair, a book in his lap, brown loafers burrowed in grass.

  He was preparing to fly that evening to Zurich. He’d already packed and confirmed the car service, double-checked his passport and traveler’s checks, written down phone numbers for Cynthia, who’d inevitably misplace them as soon as he left—he’d find the sheet with his carefully written note buried under a stack of magazines two months after he returned. Four and a half years into his marriage, he still traveled routinely for work—brief trips, four days, a week at most, packed full with meetings and dinners, discussions of contracts, negotiations, and an afternoon to slip into a museum to gawk at paintings he’d seen reproduced in books. At most he took two extra suits, a second pair of shoes, slippers for evenings, and a small pillow for the airplane. This time he might bring the picture, too, to keep home in his thoughts—an unnecessary gesture, maybe, and sentimental, but one his business associates seemed to expect when they asked about his family.

  When he’d still been single he used to spend these last hours before a flight sitting in his darkening living room, eating the simplest meal he could think of—rice with beef skewers, usually, sent up from a hibachi restaurant around the corner—staring ou
t the window onto cabs lunging downtown, the doorman across the avenue blowing smoke into an awning. Even when he was traveling to a place he’d been a dozen times before, he had the feeling of heading into uncharted territory, and though he knew his return flight information by heart, there remained in his mind the small possibility that he’d never find his way back.

  If this had made him fret, it was only because of Franklin, who would shun his cat sitter and mope around the apartment, eating almost nothing, for at least three days after Paul came home. His sister Reggie had promised to take Franklin if anything ever happened to Paul, but he knew Reggie had no interest in cats, and even more, that she never kept her word. At best, what she really meant was that if something happened to Paul she’d take Franklin to the pound rather than let him starve to death in the empty apartment.

  Now Franklin was over twelve, and either age or the suburbs had subdued him. He no longer seemed to notice when Paul was gone, and though Paul tried to give him extra affection when he came back from a trip, pulling him onto his lap and sneaking a few treats into his kibble, Franklin mostly wanted to sleep on the crack between the couch cushions, leaving a fur-covered indentation that had Cynthia grumbling about covering all the furniture with plastic. Even with the kids to look after him, Paul worried about the cat during these final hours before a flight, and after putting the camera aside he couldn’t keep himself from saying to Kyle, “Indoors only when I’m gone, okay? Even with the leash.”

  “He likes it out here,” Kyle said.

  “He might get loose. He doesn’t know his way back.”

  “He never goes farther than that rock,” Cynthia said, jumping on her shovel and shimmying back and forth.

  “He’s just as happy inside,” Paul said. “And he doesn’t have claws, remember? He can’t defend himself if something attacks him.”

  “What kind of something?” Cynthia asked, glancing at the narrow strip of woods that separated their yard from the neighbor’s. “A coyote? A bear?”

  “A wolf,” Kyle said.

  “Maybe a werewolf,” Cynthia said.

  “I saw another raccoon last week,” Paul said. “They’re vicious.”

  “He’s only got a few years left,” Kyle said. “He might as well enjoy himself.”

  “He enjoys himself inside. And he’s got plenty of years left.” On the rock, Franklin was a lifeless lump, head sunk on paws, tail wrapped around his haunches, only his ear occasionally twitching, and Paul fought off an urge to run to him and sweep him into his arms. “He could live to twenty or more.”

  “Not if you keep feeding him so much,” Joy said, clapping, swinging her arms over her head, jumping with her legs spread apart. She was trying out for the freshman cheerleading team next month, and though she had the moves down, her sense of rhythm was so inconsistent, her chants so out of synch with the flailing of her limbs, her smile so painfully inauthentic when she cried, “Go Mallards!” that Paul had already begun to imagine consoling her when the team turned her down. Now she put her hands on her hips, flung her head to the right and then the left, ponytail whipping one cheek and then the other. “Look how fat he is,” she said, gesturing at Franklin. “He can hardly clean his tail.” So skinny herself—her thighs indistinguishable from her calves—she’d recently decided everyone else was overweight. She’d suggested both Paul and Cynthia go on diets and even warned Kyle to watch how much ice cream he ate if he didn’t want to get called a pudge when he started junior high in the fall. As for herself, she could eat anything she wanted and never gain an ounce. “Are you bringing back chocolate bars this time?” she asked.

  “Chocolate isn’t good for your skin,” Paul said. So far she’d had only a small streak of acne on her chin, but he remembered the pain and humiliation of blemishes only too well, even thirty years later. If he ever forgot, he had the scars on his cheeks to remind him.

  “I don’t like the dark ones,” Joy said, ignoring him just as her mother did when she wasn’t interested in what he had to say.

  “No nuts,” Kyle said.

  Cynthia bent down to the hole she’d dug and yanked out a chunk of root, eight inches long and as thick around as Paul’s wrist, severed at either end. “Plenty of dark nuts for me,” she said, and then put on a look of offended innocence when the kids snorted and laughed.

  “I’ll miss you,” Paul said, and tried his best to mean it. He slipped the photograph onto the porch step above Kyle. On the rock, Franklin stretched out a paw and turned his chin up to the sun.

  The truth was, as soon as he settled himself on the plane, Paul felt only relief. What he might have missed about his family he experienced only vaguely, or rather intellectually, knowing he couldn’t live without them but not thinking about what living without them would actually mean. Even when he imagined Franklin getting loose when Kyle inevitably brought him outside, running into the woods and getting flayed by a rabid raccoon while flailing his impotent paws, Paul could get himself worked up only to the point of mild irritation. It was as if as soon as the plane’s doors closed, he was shut off from Cynthia, from the kids and the cat, and also shut off from the part of himself that felt responsible for them and their well-being.

  The firm still flew him first-class, and he enjoyed the way the stewardess smiled at him when she handed him a drink, though he knew she was paid to do so. She was supposed to make him feel important, and with a scotch and soda in hand—something he drank only on airplanes—his attaché case open on his lap, the wide expanse of leather behind his back, he felt his importance universally, if briefly, acknowledged. The stewardess wasn’t as attractive as he might have hoped, or as young, but her smile was warm, her lips naturally pouty and painted dark red, and when she spoke he found her voice pleasant, her accent mild and musical. He liked the way she said his name—with “a” sounding like “ah” in “Mr. Haberman”—and when she asked if she could hang up his jacket, he stood and let her slip the sleeves from his arms. She pouted genuinely when he declined the cheese plate she offered as an appetizer. “You must find hunger for dinner,” she said. “I do not accept no for an answer.”

  He promised he would, though he knew hunger wouldn’t find him for some time yet, because despite all his protests, Cynthia had prepared an elaborate meal with which to send him off, a baked chicken dish with a lot of cheese and a side of pasta that left him feeling bloated and nostalgic for his rice and skewers. What he’d really wanted instead of a big family dinner was to ship the kids off to their father’s for the evening so that he and Cynthia could make love and lounge in bed for the two hours before the car service came to pick him up.

  But dinner took longer to prepare than Cynthia had anticipated, and then she insisted he eat a piece of the peach pie she’d bought, and the car service showed up before he’d finished. He had to run upstairs to grab his bags, and the best he could manage was a quick peck on Cynthia’s lips before rushing out the door. On his way, he ruffled Kyle’s hair and gave Joy a hug, and to his surprise she crushed her skinny body against him, pointy bones and too much perfume and the breasts that had seemed to spring, fully formed, from the flat front of her in the last year. “Remember not to eat too much,” she said in his ear, and then he was heading down the front steps to the driveway, where a driver was holding open the door of a shiny black Lincoln. But the embrace stayed with him all the way to the airport, the suddenness of it, the pressure of her long slim fingers against his back, the bump of her knee into his thigh.

  And now, buckled into his seat for takeoff, his attaché case stashed underneath, a contract to review on his lap, it wasn’t Cynthia’s body he found himself picturing, nor Joy’s, but that of his last lover before getting married, a young woman who waited tables at a restaurant around the corner from his office, where he often took meetings with co-workers and clients. For months she’d flirted with him in a breezy, unserious way that he understood as a means to bigger tips, but one afternoon, on his way out, she handed him her number and said, “You’ve bee
n wanting to ask for that, right?” They saw each other for two and a half months, and during that time Paul took secret pleasure in watching her scramble dizzyingly through the restaurant, always, it seemed, on the verge of a breakdown. She was a terrible waitress, constantly writing orders wrong, forgetting to bring ketchup or fresh coffee, fumbling soup bowls and spilling half their contents down her legs. While he chatted calmly with his lunch companion, he’d picture the way she threw off her clothes when they came into his apartment after dinner or a movie, not even waiting for him to kiss her before unbuttoning her blouse and dropping her skirt, always in a hurry to get on to what they’d both been imagining all evening.

  On the plane, it was a particular image that came to mind: the young woman leaving his bed, her body in shadow, then backlit in the frame of the bathroom door, then gone behind it. For just a moment her silhouette was frozen in front of him, and woozy with sex and fatigue, Paul was struck with the notion that he was glimpsing something he could call perfect. The curve of shoulder and hip, the narrow V of parted thighs, the lift of heels off the cold floor. Combined, these things left the impression of something less than solid, the phantom of a woman he’d never met rather than the outline of one whose body he’d felt beneath him moments before, whose skin had been slick against his, whose breath had steamed the side of his face.

  And somehow the thought that he’d never meet this woman, never could meet her, disappointed him so deeply that he wanted only to be alone in the apartment, and when his lover came back to bed he couldn’t speak. She snuggled against him, and though it was the same curve of hip that pressed into his side, the same V of thighs now closed around his hand, he felt only the odd rubberiness of her chilled skin and the unpleasant texture of goose bumps. She kissed him on the ear, on the cheek, but he didn’t respond. After a minute she asked what was wrong. “Tired,” he muttered, and though he could feel her stiffen beside him, her hip pulling away, he did nothing to keep her close.