Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (32 page)

Chapter 32
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I
am
waiting for William. It is hot for September and I am sweating as I stand outside the door of the kindergarten class at the Ethical Culture School. I am aloof from the crowd of waiting mothers, partly because the kindergarten mothers don't trust second wives any more than nursery school mothers did, but mostly because I do not want anyone to jostle and crush what I have brought. It is delicate, and I don't trust five-year-olds.

“Hey, it's not Wednesday,” William says when he sees me.

“But it
is
your lucky day.”

“Why aren't you working?”

“I took the day off.” Allison has gotten me a job in the appellate division of Legal Aid. I write briefs for a living now. When my brother-in-law and his colleagues are unsuccessful in convincing juries to release their young clients to continue roaming the hopeless streets, I urge appellate judges to do so instead. I like the work very much, and I think I'm good at it. Brief writing, after all, is the part of lawyering I'm best at.

“Where's Sonia?”

“She took the day off, too.”

“What's that?”

“A fried egg.”

“Seriously.”

“What does it look like?”

“A boat. A remote control boat.”

“Bingo.” I dip the boat down where he can see it more clearly. It is a miniature tall ship, with cloth sails and a wooden mast. There is a very small pirate at the helm. He wears a tiny patch on his eye. The boat cost almost $200 and was not the most expensive in the store. Not even close.

“It's a pirate ship!”

“Indeed. Come on, let's go.”

“Where are we going?”

“Duh,” I say.

“Model boat pond?”

“Bingo.”

“Okay,” William says. “Let me get my backpack and my lunch box.”

         

T
he model boat pond is actually called the Conservatory Water,” William says as we launch the boat into the stagnant green water. “Most people don't know that.”

He is a natural on the remote control. I stand back and look around the pond. Up the path I can see the small boys and girls clamber over the Alice in Wonderland statue, giving chase to the pigeons that befoul her shoulders with white-and-black goo.

“This is excellent,” William says. He buzzes the ship along the shore and then takes it out to the middle of the pond.

“Avast there, matey,” I say.

“Ahoy. Not Avast.”

“Ahoy there, matey.”

William gives me a turn and I do my best, but my circles are not as tight as his and we are both worried that I will capsize the ship.

“You have a fine ship, Emilia,” William says.

“I bought it for you, dude.”

“No kidding? For me! That is so excellent.” William attempts a risky figure eight.

“It's your birthday present.”

“My birthday is next month, in October.” He frowns. “Does this mean you won't be giving me a present on my actual birthday?”

“It's not for
your
birthday. It's your present, and it's for a birthday, but it's not for your birthday. Get it?”

“No.”

“Think.” I sit down on the concrete shoulder of the pond, my back to the water. I cross my eyes at him.

“Blair,” he says at last.

“You got it.”

Carolyn called Jack this morning on her way to the hospital. She is in labor, and so William will be staying with us for a few days, until after she has had a day or two alone at home with the baby.

“He was born today, while I was at school?”

“He's being born right now. Or will be soon. Your dentist will call Daddy as soon as the baby makes his appearance.”

William says, “The baby's name is going to be Blair Soule Doty. The first. That's a Roman numeral. And I'm William Soule Woolf I. We have the same middle name, and we are both firsts.”

“I know. You've told me that about six hundred times. It's a great name. They're both great names.”

“I'll have to draw a family portrait with Blair in it.” He executes another tight turn. “You never saw the family picture I drew in nursery school.”

“I saw it.” I cross my legs in front of me and hold my face up to the sun. It is warm against my cheeks. We are having a brilliant September Indian summer. I close my eyes. “It was beautiful.”

“I made Isabel as an angel.”

I open my eyes. “I know.”

“That was for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The angel was for you. I don't actually believe in angels. I don't think there is a heaven where people go when they die. But I thought it would make you feel good to think of Isabel like that, like a little angel with wings, flying over your head.”

I reach my hand out and stroke William's hair. He tolerates my touch for a moment before he returns to the ship. I say, “It did. It did make me feel good.”

“What do you think happens when you die? Do you believe in angels?”

I think of Isabel, an angel with luminous wings, fluttering over my head. “No, I don't think so.”

“Jews don't. Especially not Orthodox Jews. I mean, they don't believe in the heaven kind of angels. Remember when I said I was an Orthodox Jew?”

“I do.”

“Only I'm not really an Orthodox Jew.”

“I know, William.”

“Episcopalians believe in angels and in heaven, but I don't think I'm an Episcopalian either.”

“No?”

“No. I think I might be Buddhist. Buddhists believe in reincarnation. That means that you get to come back as someone else. Or as an animal. Do you believe in that? Do you think Isabel might come back as an animal? A fish in the model boat pond, maybe? Or a penguin in the Central Park Zoo? Or maybe she'll come back as Blair. Then she'll be my brother, instead of my sister.”

This stops me. Would Isabel want so much to live that she would come back as another mother's child? As Carolyn's child? Perhaps as mine, the child I will have one day. I wish for William's kindergarten-Buddhist certainty. “I don't know, William. I guess I don't really believe in reincarnation.”

William swoops his ship down on a stray leaf. Then he careens it around the edge of the pond, his turn so tight the mast is nearly at a forty-five degree angle.

“Well,” he says. “What do you think happened to Isabel when she died?”

“I guess I think that Isabel is just gone, that whatever she was, whatever made her different from everybody else, disappeared when she did.”

“So you believe in nothing.” He says it as if he has heard about believing in nothing before. Believing in nothing is a concept he understands.

“I don't know, William. I just don't know.”

William spins the dial on his remote control and the ship turns crazily, tipping on its side, nearly capsizing before it rights itself again. “Well, I'm a Buddhist.”

“Go for it,” I say.

“I'll let you know if I find Isabel.”

“You do that. It makes me feel good knowing you're doing that.” I watch him at the controls. He is so confident. “It's time to bring the boat in now.”

“One more circle.”

William circles the boat around the pond, very slowly, dragging out his time. When he brings the boat in to dock, I pull it out of the water and shake it off.

William holds his arms out for his boat. It is too big for him to carry, but I let him take it. I put the remote control in my purse.

“I love my boat, Emilia. Thank you for the birthday present.”

“You're welcome, William Soule Woolf the first. Happy Blair's birthday. I love you.”

And I do love him. I am in love with this scrawny know-it-all of a boy, with his irritating precocity and his embarrassingly cloistered and self-centered view of the world. I have fallen in love with him, not with the mad hysterical rush of instantaneous, spontaneous passion I felt for his father, but slowly, jolting and creaking along, like a three-wheeled cart on a rutted dirt road. I did not tumble down a precipice into this love, I climbed up the side of a rocky crag of Manhattan schist, my fingernails breaking against the rock, my knees scraped and torn, spread-eagled as I searched for toeholds and fingerholds.

This love was so hard to recognize, but I have finally been able to see it for what it is—grace. Grace is when something is more beautiful than we deserve, more elegant and lovely than it should be. Grace is like Central Park. Carved from schist and swamp, boulders and undergrowth, by a vast construction project of thousands of surveyors, dirt carters, blasting teams, roadbuilders, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and bricklayers, Central Park is, in this city of steel and glass, marble and asphalt, brick and stone, 843 acres of grace. It is far more lovely, more bedecked with weeping willows trailing into moss-filled ponds, gentle arching bridges, blue-gray gnatcatchers, than any Nasdaq-obsessed stock trader, any taxi driver with a law degree from the University of Karachi, any Upper West Side mother of twins, or any of us eight million different kinds of New Yorkers deserves. The citizens of other cities are surely no less wonderful than we are, no less special, no less worthy of sanctuary. Yet we have our grace, and most other cities but a modicum of theirs.

When I saw William, outside the zoo, his legs dangling from his father's shoulders, I saw in him the impediment to the fulfillment of the angel's plan. But I was wrong. The gorgeousness of life comes in accidental beauty; it comes in inexplicable grace. Grace, like when a child brings to your life an unplanned magic.

William Soule Wolfe, my unsought, my fortuitous grace.

Acknowledgments
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

This book was written in large part at the MacDowell Colony, and I am forever grateful for the gift of time and space that marvelous institution provides. The generosity of the Stanford Calderwood Foundation made my fellowship there possible.

The following people gave me insights and assistance: Andrew of Le Pain Quotidien, Hillery Borton, Sylvia Brownrigg, Alicia Costelloe, Carmen Dario, Elizabeth Gaffney, Andy Greer, Daniel Handler, Rick Karr, Kristina Larsen, Micheline Marcom, Devin McIntyre, Daniel Mendelsohn, Peggy Orenstein, Susanne Pari, Lis Petkevich, Elissa Schappell, Nancy Schulman and Alix Friedman of the 92 Street Y Preschool, Mona Simpson, Carla Sinz, Joshua Tager, Sedge Thomson, Vendela Vida, and Ires Wilbanks. And, of course, Michael Chabon.

For championing this book I am indebted to Maggie Doyle, Karen Glass, Marc Platt and Abby Wolf-Weiss, Sylvie Rabineau, and Marianne Velmanns. And the champion of them all, Mary Evans.

Most of all I am grateful to the incomparable Phyllis Grann.

Also by Ayelet Waldman

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