They May Not Mean To, but They Do: A Novel (25 page)

“Because,” he said, just as slowly and clearly, “she has no money.”

*   *   *

Joy knew they spoke to each other about her. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t want to know what it was about, either, because she already did: it was about what to do with her.

They were always coming up with electronics that were meant to make her life easier but ran out of batteries.

“They mean well,” she said to Karl. He had not died, but he had suffered from a long bout of flu. This was his first day out.

“I’m sorry I worried you,” he said. “Why didn’t you call?”

“No news is good news, Karl.” They were sitting in Central Park on a bench facing a noisy playground. “Molly and Daniel want me to be happy, but they’re driving me crazy. I think someone of my age and experience should be allowed to feel exactly the way she wants.”

“Hear, hear.”

“Which is miserable.”

“Hear, hear.”

It was pleasant to have someone to meet in the park, to meet at the coffee shop, someone who knew her when she was young and beautiful, someone who remembered the things she remembered. Karl began to tell her a story about an uncle who had been a bootlegger but got the flu and missed a meet-up at which everyone else got shot. She’d heard the story before and closed her eyes. Oh, Aaron, she thought, her attention drifting comfortably, I do miss you. You should be here with us. You loved this story.

“Are you married?” she asked Marta as the three of them walked slowly across Fifth Avenue. Joy wondered if men still married their nurses, the way they did in World War I novels. No, now it was just doctors who married their young nurses, married doctors who left the wives who had put them through medical school.

“Don’t like,” Marta said.

“I think marriage is a fine institution.” Karl stopped to catch his breath when they reached the sidewalk.

“Institution” is a funny word, Joy thought, like a mental hospital.

“Why don’t like?” she asked Marta.

“Husband drink.”

“Well,
I
don’t drink,” Karl said. “Not excessively.”

“
Or
,” Marta added pointedly, “husband
old
. Get sick.”

Joy repeated the conversation to Danny, laughing, but he seemed quite serious and said, “Well, she’s right. Terrible to get stuck with an old invalid. At least Marta gets paid for all she does to take care of him.”

“Well, of course she’s right, in a way, but it never stops anyone, does it? You should hear what goes on in Florida.”

“I think I’d rather not.”

*   *   *

“I think it’s nice she has a friend,” Coco said. “Someone she can talk to.”

“She can talk to me.”

Coco suggested he might be jealous.

“She doesn’t understand,” Molly said when he told her. “She doesn’t understand us,” she said to Freddie.

Freddie understood. The clan was pulling together just as they had when Daniel was in the hospital, when Aaron went bankrupt. The Bergmans against the world. There was no room for an outsider. The emptiness left by Aaron’s death was not a space to be filled; it was a bond to be protected.

44

Ruby’s bat mitzvah was months away, but Joy began going through her clothes, looking for something suitable to wear. It was a tiring business, trying on clothes. She made sure to do it in the morning before her afternoon fatigue set in. The discarded dresses and trousers and jackets and blouses were strewn around her bedroom, colorful, fluttering like flags when she passed.

“What in god’s name happened?” Daniel said when he saw her bedroom.

“I’m looking for an outfit.”

He pushed some clothes aside and sat on the edge of the bed. “Where do you sleep?”

“On the couch. In the living room.”

The dining-room table was again covered in papers. And now that Walter and Wanda were no longer coming and Elvira was back to once every two weeks, the kitchen was a mess. Daniel washed the dishes in the sink, then opened the refrigerator. It was filled with demitasse saucers, some covered with plastic wrap, some with aluminum foil, some with paper towels, some uncovered. How many demitasse saucers could one person own? There had to be thirty diminutive saucers, and beside them was a jumble of plastic containers used for condiments at coffee shops.

“Hungry?” his mother asked. “I have half a hard-boiled egg somewhere, and a little bit of applesauce. There’s a bit of chicken soup … Oh no, don’t touch that dish, that’s food for Gatto…”

Daniel said he was not hungry. He sat at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” his mother said. “Tired? You work too hard. You need a vacation. You’re the one who should have gone to California, Danny, not me.” She came over and rubbed his head. He still had all his hair. Just like his father. “Poor dear.”

Daniel stared at the floor, at his own big feet, at his mother’s feet in scuffed slippers.

“Mom,” he said softly. He did not want to alarm her. “Mom, a mouse just ran across your foot.”

His mother laughed. “Oh, him again.”

Daniel telephoned Molly from the subway platform. “Do you realize how much an attendant will cost?”

“She doesn’t need an attendant.”

“Oh, but she will. And soon, believe me.”

“How do
you
know?”

“Molly, a mouse was standing on her foot.”

That was an alarming development, Molly had to admit. “But I don’t see how an attendant would help with mice,” she said. “Did you call the super?”

“Of course I called the super. The exterminator is coming tomorrow. But that is not the point and you know it. She has to have some help. Which means she has to spend money. Which means she has to get some money. She won’t take it from us, and we don’t have enough to cover it, anyway, which means she has to sell the house.”

*   *   *

“How would Daniel and Coco like it if I told them to sell their loft,” she said to Freddie. “How would they like it, the loft they bought so many years ago when no one wanted to live in their disgusting neighborhood, the loft they so lovingly restored bit by bit until now it’s worth millions of dollars, how would they feel about
that
?”

“But the point is to keep your mother in her apartment,” Freddie said gently, “to keep her independent and, and … mouse-free.”

“Yes, but—”

“Daniel’s just trying to figure things out, honey.”

Molly grunted a thank-you, but no one understood about the house. Freddie thought it was a dump, anyway. It wasn’t a dump. It was rustic. If by rustic you mean uncomfortable, Daniel once said. No one understood.

45

Joy thought of asking Karl to dinner. Boeuf bourguignon, a baguette, a salad—she could see the meal, it looked lovely, civilized, and Joy would have given a lot to feel civilized. Instead, she felt lurching and matted, like a wild dog. She hadn’t made boeuf bourguignon in twenty years. She’d barely eaten boeuf in twenty years. The thought of it, the fat as it browned in the pan, was sickening. And she was no chef these days, scuffing around the kitchen tugging weakly at the recalcitrant refrigerator door, burning toast.

“We’ll order Chinese,” Karl said when she told him her problem.

“We’ll eat on paper plates!”

“Like young people when they move into their first apartment and haven’t unpacked the boxes.”

Joy wondered what it would have been like to be young in a first apartment with Karl, no money, boxes of books, and a scratched desk from home. Joy and Aaron had furnished their first apartment with a decorator, Danish modern, she had gotten rid of most of it, uncomfortable stuff, though it was worth a fortune now, judging by
Antiques Roadshow.

“Where was your first apartment?” she asked Karl. “After college?”

“I lived with my parents for a couple of years. Saved money. Then Joan and I got married and we bought the place I’m in now.”

“You were always careful.”

“And dull.”

“No, I mean it in a good way. You were always not careless.”

“You were always glamorous.”

“And ditzy.”

“I mean it in a good way, too. You were like sunshine, that kind of glamorous. Bright and shining and warm and cheerful. And unattainable.”

Maybe I’ll put out real plates, Joy thought.

*   *   *

The dining room looked pretty. Joy had stacked all her files in shopping bags that were pushed into one corner of the room. At the florist she bought a petite arrangement of small flowers gathered into an old-fashioned bouquet. There were candles, unlit; she could not find a match.

“I go,” Marta said when she had helped Karl off with his coat and settled him into a chair. Gatto jumped in his lap.

Joy said, “Just what I needed, right? A dog.”

“I had a dog as a kid. I loved that dog.”

“Never got one for your own kids?”

“No. Joan couldn’t bear it.”

“The mess, the walking, and the kids promise to take it out, but then they have homework…”

“No. It was just she loved her childhood dog so much, and when he died she was heartbroken, and well, if we had gotten a dog, they don’t live that long, it would certainly have died in her lifetime, and she said it was just too painful. She just didn’t want to go through that again.”

Joy brought the containers of Chinese food out on gaily patterned trays. It was a picnic, the takeout containers right on the table. She noticed Karl did not bother with chopsticks. Aaron had insisted on them when they had Chinese food, saying forks changed the flavor. But Joy was never very handy with chopsticks.

If Karl got a dog, she thought, they could walk their dogs together, if his dog liked to walk. Otherwise they could carry them together. People would stop them to ask about the little dogs. Karl could get a basket for his walker.

“I can’t think that way,” he was saying.

“About what?”

“Worrying about getting attached, about the pain of losing someone. I can’t live like that. Not anymore. Too old…”

Joy did not bring up her idea of a basket for Karl’s red walker. He didn’t seem to be talking about dogs anymore.

46

“Thank god it’s almost time to drive Mom Upstate, away from that man and into the bosom of her loving family in her own little house.”

“You’re a little prudish about your mother,” Freddie said. It just came out.

“I don’t want her to be taken advantage of, that’s all.”

“I’m not sure what you and Daniel think Karl is after. Her virginity? Isn’t it possible he just really likes her?”

Molly had assumed her sullen face, an expression so infantile and so obvious that Freddie was always tempted to laugh. Instead, she said, “You just don’t like it that your mother has a boyfriend. Admit it.”

“He’s not her boyfriend.”

“Whatever that would mean, anyway.” But Freddie was happy to drop the subject. She had her own relatives to worry about. Her brothers and sisters would soon be there, though not for long.

“They’ll be in L.A. for three days, that’s it, three lousy days. It’s probably the last time they’ll see my father, the last time we’ll all be together, and I can’t decide if I wish they’d stay longer or leave after one night or not come at all. I have a fucked-up family.”

“He’s
not
her boyfriend.”

*   *   *

“I’ll miss you,” Karl said.

He was wearing a cashmere blazer. Joy patted his arm. Aaron had favored hearty tweed. She’d always loved his custom-made jackets and suits. Now they called them bespoke. Aaron had looked like a country gentleman, what country she could not have said, but she would have followed him there, she knew that much. She had followed him there, she supposed. The sleeves of his sweaters and tweeds had always been rather itchy to her touch. She ran her hand along Karl’s arm again. “Soft,” she said.

Karl was someone you could call dapper and mean it as a compliment, not a suggestion of fussiness. Marta did right by him. He looked marvelous today, Joy thought, in the spring sunshine, his shoes polished, his blue shirt pressed, his tie a deeper blue paisley.

“It’s a little too wide to be fashionable,” he said when she complimented it. “But I’ve always loved it, so I just keep on wearing it.”

He had admitted to her that he kept most of his clothes for decades, that he had shoes from his college days. He took good care of everything. Shoe trees, cedar closet, sweaters wrapped in tissue. His wife had teased him about it.

“You look very good in blue,” Joy said.

“You look good in every color.”

Joy laughed. They were walking beneath the trees on Fifth Avenue, beneath the fresh new leaves, beneath the sweetness of the air. “The wreck of the
Hesperus
. That’s what I feel like. In every color.”

Karl pushed his red wheeled walker and Joy kept one hand on it to hold herself steady. In a few days he would be off to stay with his son in Rhode Island. She would be off to her house Upstate.

“I’ve been thinking,” Karl said.

Joy said, “Stop.” She had to catch her breath.

In the park, a group of girls wearing headscarves were playing softball. She watched while the banging in her chest slowed. She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if it’s pollen or my heart. Who can tell anymore?”

“It’s the exciting company you keep.”

“I used to love softball,” she said. The pitcher was winding up. A strike. “Brava.”

Karl laughed. “Is that what they say at Yankee Stadium?”

They started walking again. Joy wished that Marta had stuck around. She was feeling a little strange. She had hung two of her bags on Karl’s walker, but the third one, with Gatto peering out of it, was weighing her down.

“So,” Karl said, “I was thinking.”

“Karl, would you mind if we sat down for a minute? I’m feeling wobbly.”

They made their way to a bench, backs to a stone wall that separated them from the park, but Joy could hear the park sounds clearly, the high-pitched pleasure of children, the squeak of swings, dogs barking, the ping of bicycle bells, whoops and cheers and chattering squirrels. Gatto emerged from the bag and stretched out in a patch of sun on the ground. Joy closed her eyes against the glare of the afternoon sun reflected from the apartment windows across the street. Someone with a French accent asked Karl where the Guggenheim was. The smell of spring was everywhere. And the faintest smell of urine.