Arcadia (26 page)

The loss cudgels into him again. His fork full of mashed potatoes is heavy in his hand. He’ll never understand how anyone would walk away from the tiny perfect place between Helle and Grete. He doesn’t believe anyone could.

His parents speak to each other; Hannah dabs cranberry sauce from Grete’s cheek. Bit can only look into the soft sift in the windows where he sees what his parents can’t; not knowing the whole, they can’t understand the lack. He, Bit, had let a coffee go cold in his hands, as he listened to the radio announcer describe how the two planes had flung themselves into the buildings there. Nearly two decades earlier, when he and his parents came into the city, he had named the buildings after Hannah and Astrid, playing with the way everyone in Arcadia had called the women the Twin Towers for their height and blondness; no matter that the buildings themselves grated on his sense of beauty, too awkward in their ambition. He’d grown accustomed to their silhouettes on the skyline. He gave them characteristics shared with their namesakes: Astrid colder, Hannah’s antenna the crown he’d always imagined for his mother. Almost twenty years after he first saw them, the one called Astrid collapsed in a skirt of dust. After that, the one called Hannah. He turned off the radio and felt the sadness well blackly up, and there was no way to tamp it down. It was absurd; thousands had died; his personal loss was a hole in the sky. But he couldn’t help it. He knew enough to get out, on foot, to go to Jincy’s neatnik house in the suburbs, to let her care for him.

The city, he’d thought at first, would do all right: there was hurt but a terrible rage to temper it. He was wrong. Even now, years later, it hasn’t quite rebounded. It winces and holds itself more closely. Even before the global downturn it seemed to Bit as if people were making do with their second-best coats, withholding their fullest joy. On the days that he swings through the city on his walks and watches his fellow creatures move with tight, clipped steps, he can almost grasp what they lost. It wasn’t what they believed; it wasn’t real estate or lives. It was the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships onto the oyster-strewn island and traded land for guilders: that this place filled with water and wildlife was special, rare, equitable. That it could embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty. That this equality of purpose would keep them safe.

It isn’t important if the story was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.

Bit surprises himself by interrupting what Abe has been saying, something about curmudgeonly old Titus winning a thousand bucks from a lottery ticket. His voice is loud and fast with an urgency that startles Grete out of her dreamy play.

Abe, he says, it wasn’t the country that was so beautiful about the whole Arcadian experiment, don’t you see? It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can’t you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We’ve gone urban because we’re all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection. Do you understand? It doesn’t exist anymore anywhere else.

He feels himself close to tears. The others stare at him. Grete puts down her fork and slides off her chair and climbs into Bit’s lap and pats his cheeks with her starfish hand. His parents send looks across the table to one another, as if to say, He’s finally going off the rails.

I’m not going off the rails, he says.

We never said you were, they say at once, and smile at each other. Jinx, says Hannah. You owe me a sodapop, says Abe, and they laugh in relief that they have deflected Bit, at least for now, at least a little.

Classes are like shoals of fish, Bit thinks at this week’s photography critique: something hungry gets into them and they surpass their natural speed. Sylvie’s group has begun to astound him. Their subjects are adult, deeply thought, riskier than undergraduates usually work (one boy takes photos of his little cousins in the bathtub, flirting with the line between art and child pornography; one girl takes a series of hands disappearing into the folds of fabric, silks and burlaps and muslins and cotton wool, gorgeously sensuous). There is a strange heat in the room whenever he enters it. And Sylvie of the shredded teeshirts, the knee-high boots, Sylvie whose face is so naked and pleading, smiles and praises when praise is due, and when it isn’t, she looks at Bit and holds her tongue and seems to be saying, Go on, please. I’m waiting.

It is a year to the day that Helle went missing. Bit hires a baby-sitter and takes Sharon from downstairs to dinner.

Are you sure? she said this morning, handing him the coffee, trying to keep from looking too pleased. This could ruin everything, you know. She passed her hand through her short black hair, blinked her dark eyelashes prettily.

I’m sure, he said and carried her smile with him through the day.

They go to the Italian place down the way. The food isn’t wonderful, but it is fine: Chianti out of straw-trousered bottles, fettuccine Alfredo, cannoli. It feels odd, good, to walk with a woman who is smaller than he is, even in heels. Sharon looks surprisingly beautiful tonight in her neat blue dress, sleeveless to show off her sharp shoulders, her face carefully outlined with makeup. She smiles a lot. Only her hands are nervous, patting the menu, straightening the silverware, plate, votive again and again.

They talk about the children, about their exes, about the weather. They relax. Now they’re on the subject of books. Without other media, never a television, never a computer, books have always made up much of Bit’s life. Sharon leans forward, her brownish lipstick worn off at the center of her lips. Her eyes kindle. She begins talking about Ayn Rand.

She changed my life, she says breathlessly. Howard Roark! Dominique Francon! Ayn is the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Objectivism. I read
Atlas Shrugged
in college and thought, Oh, my God, everything’s coming into focus, finally. You know what I mean?

Bit listens, trying to make his face neutral. And talks, in turn, about George Eliot, whom Sharon had never heard of.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,
he quotes,
it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Sharon takes a long slow sip of wine. I don’t get it, she says finally.

They go back to Sharon’s apartment. Frankie and Grete are asleep upstairs at Bit’s, with the babysitter. Sharon’s place has the same floor plan as Bit’s, and it is almost as bare as his, as if she, too, had been reared in a bread truck the size of a closet. But Bit’s has color and comfort and heat, and Sharon’s is white and very cold. Sorry it’s so chilly, she calls from the bathroom. When Frankie’s not here, I turn down the thermostat. Saving pennies. Times are tight.

When she comes back, she sits next to Bit and without much ado presents her mouth to be kissed. She is a good kisser, involved and slow. Her belly is slightly springy to the touch, but warm.

Bit extracts himself. I’m sorry, he says.

Oh. Me too, she says glumly. She bites her cuticles. I’m not beautiful like your ex.

No, he says, and when she looks startled, he says, Oh, yes you are. I meant, no, that’s not it. It just doesn’t feel right to me.

They hold hands and listen to the clock on the mantel ticking. They can hear the baby-sitter upstairs, the movie playing on her laptop.

He says, I think it was the Ayn Rand.

Sharon laughs and laughs, and when she stops, she squeezes his forearm. Oh, I always seem to have a hopeless crush on you handsome bleeding-heart liberals. I need to find me a nice old conservative.

Good luck in this city, he says, standing. If you want, I’ll carry Frankie down.

Well. Could you let him sleep? she says. If you don’t mind watching the kids, I’ll call a friend and go out on the town. The night’s still young. And so are we.

You are, he says.

You will be young again someday, too. If you let yourself, she says, and she gives him a sisterly kiss on the cheek. Now scram. I have to get on my dancing duds. He climbs the stairs and imagines Sharon in some flashing club, closing her eyes to the music, something throwbacky, full of synth and falsetto, and wishes that she could have been different than she was, a thinker; or, better, that he could have relaxed his personal code and pretended to be a different man than he is, even for the space of one night.

He goes to his last classes of the semester and collects the portfolios. His students, suddenly beautiful and dear to him, thank and touch him as they file out the door. Claps on the shoulder, hugs, handshakes. Their warmth surprises him. He thinks of himself as strict, not the kind of professor to whom anyone would feel close.

Free, he spends an hour wandering. He feels the urge to look for something, but needs nothing; he goes into and out of stores, buys a cookie and a toothbrush and a penguin for the bathtub for Grete.

Finally, he sits in the train station, watching the people go back and forth.

Once, when he was on a shoot in Europe, he went off for a few days at the end to travel. In a Swiss station filled with honey wood and clerestory light, he saw a woman on a bench, weeping. She was enormous; pieces of her hung over the armrests and into the surrounding seats. She wore a smock printed with faded blue puppies and Chinese slippers with spangles, and her feet looked like baked potatoes split out of their skins. But her hair was upswept elaborately as if she were about to attend the opera, and the hands she held in prayer before her mouth were small as finches.

Bit stood, frozen in the current of people, watching her. Not a soul stopped to ask what was wrong. He moved in indignation toward the crying woman; the crowd parted. When he was very close, he saw the broad straw hat upended and the sign propped on the woman’s belly:
Weeping Woman
, it said in four languages:
Femme Sanglotante; Donna Piangente; Weinende Frau
. The clock struck a ponderous hour. The pigeons in the rafters lifted and settled. The weeping woman turned off her sobs like water from a faucet and gathered her sign and hat. In a blink, the great mass of her dissolved into the crowd, and Bit was alone again.

Remembering this, he feels the old, hot prickle in his eyes. He thinks, Yes. But it vanishes. His angry heart calls for his attention, a fist on the door of his ribcage, beating.

Over squash ravioli and the tender new vegetables from the farmers’ market, Bit says to Grete: The sharpness of radishes on the middle of the tongue. A hot shower after a cold day. Feeling how strong you are when you squeeze my neck. A spritz of lemon in my water.

Grete has stopped eating. She is staring at her father.

The taste of an icicle, he says. The feeling of floating in a pond. A chocolate Kiss in its little foil wrapper. He smiles.

Grete says, slowly, Pumpkin pie? And when a puppy licks you on the mouth?

When a cashier’s hand touches yours when they hand back change, Bit says.

The way Hannah smells, says Grete. Abe’s funny little knock knees. Pom-poms!

And his daughter is off, so excited she is standing on her chair, invoking the tiny domestic gods of grape cough syrup and Japanese beetles and the cedar bed in the preschool’s hamster cage. Bit thinks of Helle, the long, dark path she had been for him and how the light at the end of it was this plump blondie just now spraying pesto on the floor.

Sylvie comes into his office without knocking, and locks the door behind her. He sits back. He should be grading portfolios but, with astounding inappropriateness, has been reading Duras’s
The Lover
again. It was Helle’s favorite book. He puts the book under his files, but Sylvie teases it out. She leans on the desk beside him, her legs long and pale and bony, and he thinks of the chill outside, the sleet coming down and the sludge coating the sidewalks, the goosebumps she would wear on her skin. She reads, making a moue with her lips. Her hair seems excessively clean. If someone drew lines between the moles on her face, there would be the Big Dipper on her cheek and chin. He waits. She puts the book down, bracelets clinking.

You know, she says. After you’ve graded my portfolio, you’re no longer my professor.

I’ve graded it, he says. A-minus.

When she looks hurt, he sits back. What is it about this girl that makes her so easily wounded? How easy it would be to take his anger out, to crush something good in her. There is a piece of him that is sorry she isn’t five years older, that would find her a fascinating woman when she’s been more toughened by time. Something in her could soothe him.

Well, she says. As I said, you’re not easy.

Right now I’m distinctly uneasy, he says, trying to lighten things.

She slides a foot between his. Good, she says and leans forward, her mouth coming close. He can smell the cinnamon on her breath and, deeper, the coffee.

Oh, honey, he says. No. You’re lovely, but no.

Why? she says. I’m of age. You’re not my professor.

I’m not that kind of man, he says. And you remind me of someone.

Who? she says.

Me, he wants to say. He smiles at her.

My wife, he says. When she was a little younger than you.

She leans back, chewing her lip, thinking this over. She looks as if she’s going to mention Helle’s disappearance, and he is grateful when she retracts the thought. She says, I don’t think I mind. She flushes when she holds the book up. To be a mistress. Fine with me.