Louisa Meets Bear (35 page)

How long did that go on? A few months before you were swept back into your anger at me, for the time I'd gone off with Andrew when, you'd told me in our lowest moments, your longing for me had left you feeling like a dog sniffing a bitch's backside. You shut the door in my face with a finality that had not wavered, I'd assumed, until that afternoon in the bar.

You downed your first drink and ordered a second. You told me about your work, how you had a corner on a certain set of bonds that gave you the long end of the stick and the promise of a killing by summer. And then you told me about Ilana, your fiancé, finishing her training to be a psychologist, smart enough and strong enough, I could tell from the way you described her, to manage you, the only problem being, though you never would have said it, that you could not fall in love with her.

The spritzer had too much wine and too little spritz, but I was drinking it out of nervousness anyway, the alcohol making my thoughts hard to harness, which you would have known: cheap date, you used to call me when I couldn't make it through a glass of wine without becoming silly or sleepy so you would carry me to bed, undressing me, which I felt you doing that afternoon with your eyes.

“What does she look like?” I asked about the woman you were going to marry.

“She's small and fair, with an athletic build and hazel eyes.” And then you touched my hair and I put my finger across your lips so you wouldn't say
not a long drink of water
, which is what you'd always called me.

*   *   *

I open the door, looking for the newspaper usually left on the doormat, thinking that it must have been in my dream, something about a long drink of water. It's January and the hallway is cold, and I remember with a little shiver the way I sometimes felt almost frightened in bed with you, as though what was human in you might be overtaken by what was animal. How far away that life where my body mattered—how it looked, how it felt, your response to it—seems to me now at fifty-three. In the twenty-two years since that afternoon, I've lost not only my vanity but my feeling of mind-body identity, so that I no longer believe, as you did about me, that elegance of form is elegance of being. I do my best to keep the numbers on the scale where I want them and my skin and hair well tended, but my body is now essentially the vehicle for carting around what I think of as my self. Not that Paul and I don't have sex, we do, and it has always been good, never a battlefield, but it is for both of us simply one of life's many pleasures, which as we've aged and grown have expanded to include new pleasures—bird-watching and stargazing, chamber music and Flemish paintings—and an even stronger sense that the crown jewels are those moments of communion that if we're lucky humans sometimes experience with one another and the bonds of love that get us through the forest the rest of the time.

For a moment, in that bar, with the dark wood and the wine pulsing through my veins and your fingers touching my hair, I felt you wanting me in a way no one else ever had or, I felt certain, ever would. It was as powerful as any drug I'd sampled with Andrew from his pharmacy of esoteric leaves and powders, as powerful as any emotion I would experience until I had Nate and a whole other world of feelings opened to me that left what we'd had together faded juvenilia.

Had I let go of the wheel for just a nanosecond, you would have left some bills on the table and put your hand on the small of my back and shepherded me somewhere with an enormous bed and a sea of pillows and plush towels. Am I wrong? And here is the watershed, or perhaps I should say miracle, given who I was then: having just months before met Paul, who while I nearly torpedoed my future was watching tennis with his father in the Great Neck house where he'd grown up, awaiting my call about which train I would take to come meet his parents for the first time, there was a faint but already beating awareness that the moment had arrived when I could choose happiness and, amazingly, because nothing in my past would ever have predicted such a thing, I did.

*   *   *

When Corrine and I first opened Esther Sweetie, my bakery named after my mother-in-law, who'd taught me during Paul and my Sunday visits to her house how to make coconut cake and hamantaschen and plum tarts and lemon squares, on the site of a former East Harlem bread factory Paul had discovered after the original place burned to the ground, I thought what I was trading was creating something no one really wanted, my poems, for something everyone wants. “It's not true,” Paul argued with me. “How can you say that about your poems? You've published at least two dozen, right? You've won awards. You had a poem in
The Atlantic
. How many people can say that?”

“Twenty-some poems in literary journals that no one other than other people who publish in literary journals ever reads, a few awards, and a poem in
The Atlantic
is not a life's work.”

“What about art for art's sake? I thought you believed in that.”

“Maybe for the rare genius. But I'm not Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens. The culture will survive without my poems. My work is unwanted. I don't mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean it in an utterly descriptive way. Regardless of whether my poems are brilliant or lousy, there is not an audience for them. I don't want to spend my life creating something that sits in my computer hard drive and does nothing for anyone except make me miserable.”

Paul took my hands between his.

I started to cry. It would break my heart to give up on writing poems. But it had come to feel wrong that I would have whatever talents I'd been bequeathed from my father's beloved nucleotides and all the benefits of my fine education and then do nothing but create misery for myself.

Paul looked as anguished as I felt, anguished that he could not fix my pain the way he and his father did with their clients' fire-ravaged homes.

“Look,” I said, wiping my tears on the back of my hand. “It was you who taught me that we make our own happiness. Not all of it, of course. We can't control earthquakes or cancer or death. But when I let you into my life, I turned it around.”

My husband rarely wears anything aside from Levi's and T-shirts, but like his father he always carries a pressed white handkerchief. He handed it to me.

I blew my nose. “I still remember the first time I met your parents. I took the train to their house. You and your father were sitting side by side on the couch, watching a tennis match, enjoying each other's company. Your mother had three pans of red velvet cake in the oven. She was sifting confectioner's sugar for the cream cheese icing. You and your father could smell the cake and were looking forward to eating it after dinner.”

Paul studied me, perhaps remembering the afternoon, the cake, perhaps knowing in some inchoate way the import of that day. “Imagine if your mother only baked cakes that pleased her, if she didn't care whether you and your father liked them. That's the situation with my poems. I'm done with making something only for myself.”

*   *   *

Having stayed up late waiting for Nate to get home, I want to drink a glass of juice and eat a slice of the cranberry bread I brought home last night from the bakery and read the paper and hopefully get heavy eyes and be able to go back to sleep. The
Times
, though, is not yet here. I look around as if it might have been tossed under the shoe rack we keep by the door, a silly sign still on our door from when Nate was little:
OUR FLOORS AND OUR CHILD WHO LIVES ON OUR FLOOR / APPRECIATE YOUR LEAVING YOUR SHOES BY THE DOOR.
“À la Japonaise,” I used to joke because women hate to mar their outfits by removing their footwear and men worry about holes in their socks or unpleasant smells emanating from their feet, but you would have known the real reason, you'd taught it to me when you left your collection of running shoes outside our door because you abhorred the idea of street dirt being trekked through our rooms.

On the shoe rack, placed neatly next to Nate's basketball sneakers, is a pair of burgundy ballet flats, elasticized along the edges to grip the foot, with a small black bow on the top, the kind of shoes worn barefoot with skinny jeans even in winter by the girls at Nate's school. I stare at the shoes, as though they might be a forgotten pair of mine, as though they might have been left by our housekeeper, whose bunioned feet would never fit in a shoe so tiny and delicate, my heart pounding out of control as I try to come up with some other explanation than what I know to be true.

*   *   *

Closing the door, I review in my mind Nate's arrival home last night. As always, I'd waited up for him. He'd come home at our agreed-upon time and I'd kissed him, checking for the smell of alcohol or smoke. He blew his breath into my face. “Nothing, Mom, nothing,” his voice a mixture of resentment at the intrusion and resignation that it was justified since there had been two nights this past year, one only five months ago, when he'd come home drunk and vomiting, so sick I'd sat on the bathroom floor with him until three in the morning holding his old beach bucket under his chin while he moaned, calling his pediatrician in the middle of the night to ask about alcohol poisoning, slipping ice chips through his cracked lips and then, after we'd managed to get him cleaned up enough to get into his bed, sleeping next to him on the floor to make sure if he got sick again he didn't aspirate vomit into his lungs.

Before these nights, I'd thought of my son as a good boy, sweet and smart and hardworking and, when he's happy, funny and at times kind of goofy like his father, soft in the way of boys who have been well loved by their fathers. Not like you, who lived in fear of the dark moods your father had brought home along with a never properly healed bullet wound from a war. Like his own father, Paul had taken Nate to the park every day weather would possibly permit. Winters, they'd arrive home in ski jackets and hats, pink-cheeked with freezing noses ready for steaming hot chocolate and sugar cookies; summers they'd come in sweaty and parched, gulping glasses of water and devouring the ice-cream cake or cherry pie or whatever else I had made that afternoon.

I put one of Paul's corduroy shirts on over my pajamas and walk back to Nate's room. I pause before his closed bedroom door. I knock, wait a few seconds, and then turn the handle.

For a moment, in the dim light of the room, I cannot take in what I am seeing. Two heads in my son's single bed. Nate, sprawled on his back with his mouth slightly open, his face oily from sleep, a musky scent emanating from his skin. Next to him, on her side with her back against the wall, a girl with a mess of curly red hair and her full breasts exposed.

I stare at the girl, at her pink nipples, the beauty mark on her collarbone. Even though she's lying down, I can see that she's short but with some meat on her. There's a condom wrapper thrown on the floor and a wad of tissues inside which must be the used thing.

The girl opens her eyes. She has a sweet round face with big brown eyes and full lips, and a fleeting thought passes through my mind that I am proud of my son for choosing a girl outside the emaciated blond mold that is the ideal of his group. A look of terror forms on her face. She yanks the sheet up to her shoulders and hides in the pillow.

I shake my son, as I do every morning, and he moans. He turns his back to me, as he has every school morning since he was three.

“Nate,” I say, first softly, then, a second time, louder.

“Mmmm.”

“Nate, wake up.”

“Just let me sleep, Mom. I'm still tired.”

I shake harder. “Nate. You have to wake up.”

My son shifts back toward me. He opens his eyes, shuts them, and then opens them again.

“Oh, fu-uck.”

“Nate, what is going on here?”

“Mom, get out of here, okay? Give me a minute. Fuck.” He pounds the mattress with his fist, then turns to the girl, her face still buried in the pillow. “The alarm didn't go off,” he tells her.

“You both have two minutes to get your clothes on and meet me in the kitchen. Two minutes. I'm serious.”

I walk back to the kitchen. My temples pound, my blood pressure soaring. I take a deep breath, irritated that I can't call Paul, his cell off while he sleeps due to the work calls that come at all hours, Esther panicking about Herb if the house phone were to ring so early.

I fill the coffee carafe with water and measure the ground beans into the basket. Then I fill the teakettle and start it boiling in case the girl wants tea, take the Saran off the cranberry bread, put out plates. I can't get the girl's face out of my mind. Something about it seems familiar, as though I knew her when she was younger, perhaps from one of Nate's camps or even preschool, the face utterly altered but with the individual features essentially the same.

Nate pokes his head into the kitchen. He's put on sweatpants and a T-shirt and his hair is sticking up. There's a rangy scent to him, and I'm not happy that it reminds me of you in the mornings when you'd reach for me and I'd push you away, teasing,
Go shower, I mean it
, you nuzzling your face in my neck, telling me I smelled like a shell or beach grass or something else from the sea.

Behind Nate is the girl, dressed now.

“Okay, Mom, she's going to leave. I'm just going to walk her to the elevator.”

“Oh, no, you're not,” I say, my voice sharper than I intend. “This is not a joke. You both come in here and sit down.”

“No, Mom.”

“Yes, Nate.” My jaw clenches. I am grinding my teeth. Over the past few months, Nate and I have on a couple of occasions approached this treacherous place: the awareness that he no longer has to do what I say. On each occasion, he has moved back from the precipice, both of us desperately hoping that we will eventually be able to cross that chasm without a disaster.

Nate rolls his eyes and comes into the kitchen. The girl follows, looking at the floor. She's wearing leggings with a white peasant shirt and a long cardigan. In the light, her hair is amazing: pumpkin-colored, with corkscrew curls that cascade down her back. I pour two glasses of juice and hand them each one.