Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (40 page)

As I rise in the jolting train, I can see George sitting at his desk. Shoulders steady, hand turning a page. Roy Hargrove playing softly, rebounding in my gut. I walk, swaying, and grab the nearest pole. “Joel?”

He looks up, blinks. An expression of discomfort crosses his face. “Hi, Tracy.”

“Awkward?” I say.

He gives a chagrined smile. “It's good to see you.”

“He won't answer my calls.”

Joel hesitates, choosing his words. “George has pride. That's for sure.” A slight, wry grimace plays on his mouth. “He said you ended things.”

“That's not what I think. Not at all. I didn't want to end it. Please, if you can, tell him—” I turn my palm up, at a loss to continue.

“I'm sorry, Tracy.” His face is grave. “I don't seem to have his confidence anymore myself. I'm not sure why. And he's out of town now. I haven't seen him much anyway lately. You know—or maybe you don't? He's job-hunting.”

“You're serious?”

“Oh, yes.” Joel's commentary—sharp and unspoken—is written on his face. “He's moving back to the finance world. He told me he sees a
clear path
for himself there. Says he can always do volunteer work in education on the side.” The train slows. Joel picks up his briefcase and stands. He looks tired. “I'm interviewing to replace him. It's not easy. As you know.” Black-on-white lettering scrolls outside the window of the train:
WEST FOURTH STREET
. Joel speaks quickly. “For what it's worth, he's in Toronto.”

“He is?”

“His father had a minor heart attack. George went a few days ago. Bought a used car and took off. I haven't heard from him.” With a gentle squeeze of my shoulder, Joel gets off the train.

At home, I rack my brain for Paula's last name. It takes ten minutes of variant spellings to get her number. I dial, my heart thudding.

“Hello?” In the background I hear her children.

“Paula?”

“Yes?”

“It's Tracy. Farber.”

Silence.

“George's Tracy.”

Silence.

“I heard,” I say, “about your father.”

“He's all right,” she says slowly. “Thank God.”

“Thank God,” I echo.

Silence.

“I'm so sorry,” I tell Paula. “For the hurt I've caused. But I think it's a misunderstanding. I truly do. I just wish George would talk to me. But he won't answer my phone messages.”

Paula sighs. Then she says, in a neutral voice, “Whatever my disagreements with George's lifestyle, Tracy, I'll say this. He's honest. And he's not willing to dignify what he considers a lie. He's told me you're leaving him messages. But he's not calling you because there's nothing to say after what you did. He says honesty was the best thing you two had, but now you just want to ease the shock, make the parting more comfortable.”

“That's not what I'm trying to do.”

Her voice rises. “Tracy, with all respect, you're ripping him up. Stop leaving him messages. It may ease your conscience, but it's the wrong thing to do. You rejected him. Why should he have to demean himself by negotiating that fact?”

“I didn't reject him.”

She sounds impatient. “You didn't give your whole heart to him.”

Terrified she'll get off the phone, I back down. “What else does he say?”

“He's heartsick, Tracy. I mean . . .” Her words slow. “He went to our father in the recovery room. And he said,
I failed.
Tracy, I don't know if you understand what it took for George to say that. He and Dad have had some battles that defy description. He said to Dad,
My love wasn't what I thought. My life wasn't what I thought.
” Paula lets this sink in. “I'm not saying George is coming back to the church, that's not mine to predict. But he's bent his neck.”

“Paula,” I say. “Is George in your house? Right now?”

A moment's hesitation. “I don't know if that's a good idea.”

“Please,” I say. “Paula. I just . . . I need to speak with him.”

Another silence. Then she says, in a low voice, “Meg, go tell Uncle George that Tracy is on the telephone.”

I hold my breath.

“Tell him,” Paula calls hurriedly after her daughter, her voice rising with what I know to be an argument for me. “Tell him Tracy called to see how Grandpa was.”

“Thank you,” I whisper.

Nothing. Then, in the background, the barely audible voice of a girl.

“He's not coming,” Paula says quietly. “He thanks you for asking after our father.”

She waits on the phone. I imagine her sitting patiently with me, holding my hand until I'm ready to depart.

“I love him,” I say at length.

Her farewell is gentle. “I'll pray for you.”

I set down the phone. I microwave dinner. Then sit with the plate in front of me, unable to swallow.

Pulling up my shade, I turn off my light, and face it squarely: the white flush of the city, its strangling refusal to assume any shape I recognize. My choice—my one slender protest against the armies and acolytes of marriage—has become the organizing principle of my life: isolating me, reshaping my perception of the world, demanding a stubborn, pointless faith that what I saw and felt was real. That I knew when love was being choked; that I knew when I had to upend everything to save it. That I had any idea at all what love was.

Far below my window a slow crawl of humanity make its way from work to home. Cabs sail down narrow tributaries, marquees twinkle, elevators rush unseen in dark shafts, children's nightlights flicker. With a twist in my gut I think of Elizabeth in her hospital bed, settling down to blank dreams beneath the buzz of the corridor's fluorescent bulb and the radio murmurs washing from the nurses' station.

Yolanda rises when I enter the Chinese restaurant and leads me back to the table with an expression I can think of only as goopy.

“
This,
” she says, “is Chad.”

Chad, whose skin is so dark it shines under the restaurant's unsubtle lighting, stands at my approach and beams at me. He extends a warm, dry hand and folds mine into his palms. His eyes, as brown and deep as his smile is white, are lovely. I can't help softening. He touches his forehead, miming appreciation. Then he invites
me to sit and asks me—I'm not certain how he accomplishes this, no words are involved—how I am. He seems to know my story and his deep nod acknowledges the complexity behind my truthful answer: “Managing.”

I ignore the significant look Yolanda gives me; I'm not ready to sign on completely. But I'm impressed.

Next to Chad, wearing a worn
Mad
magazine T-shirt, sits Adam. Next to him Worms, his roommate, leans back against the restaurant's taupe wall, lids at half-mast under the rim of the ever present baseball cap. Hannah is home getting a last good night's sleep; she's past due, and her OB is inducing labor tomorrow. This dinner was Yolanda's idea, a nearly intolerable generosity: get Tracy's friends together, cheer her up, get her to leave the books and shake off her mourning for an hour. I wouldn't have accepted the invitation except that Yolanda is so patently right: I need to get out.

The food is delicious, the platters piled high. Chad serves himself only after everyone else has taken from each dish. He refills Yolanda's water glass from his own. When Yolanda drops a piece of tofu he picks it off her breastbone with the deft tips of his chopsticks and pops it into her mouth, where she incises it delicately with her white teeth. As the two pieces melt on her tongue Chad watches: patient, gratified. Yolanda has, it's obvious, lured her man to bed.

The conversation hops among work, sitcoms, and what it means when gay men kiss women friends on the lips. Worms remains unaccounted for, rocking Buddha-like on the two rear legs of his chair.

Chad watches the proceedings with such bright attention that I expect him to open his mouth at any second and speak eloquent English.

“Saw
Great Expectations
on TV last night,” says Yolanda. “Do you teach that, Tracy?”

“Dickens was British. I'm an Americanist.”

“Yeah, but isn't that practically the same thing by now? I mean, with
Masterpiece Theatre
and everything?” Yolanda serves herself a spoonful of bright purple eggplant. “I felt sorry for Pip, but especially for Estella.”

I poke at my lo mein.

“Though I guess they all come out better than Miss Havisham,” Yolanda continues.

“The spider lady?” says Adam.

“Yeah,” says Yolanda. “It's lousy to be left.”

“I didn't
leave
him.” Only after the words are out of my mouth do I realize Yolanda wasn't referring to George, but to her own pained romantic history. No one came here tonight to chide me about George . . . but I've been too enmeshed in my own grief to recognize that. I blink Yolanda an apology, and finish haltingly: “I was trying to
save
something between us.” I picture the books awaiting me in my quiet apartment and wonder how soon I can leave. The air in the restaurant feels thick, the ceiling low. I am becoming Miss Havisham. I am becoming a Dickens character, smoldering with my grievance, burnishing my arguments. Shrinking instead of growing. “Sorry,” I say.

“No offense meant, Tracy,” says Yolanda. Chad is watching me, his eyes bright with such overflowing empathy that I have to look away. When I turn back he is squeezing Yolanda's plump turquoise-laden hand.

“The heart is a muscle,” Worms says.

The table is silent.

Worms teeters peaceably on his chair, intent on a plastic hanging plant above the corner radiator.

But of course, I think, that's right. The heart is a laborer. It's built for this. Love is meant to be work. The notion is, in some small way, fortifying.

“Ew,” says Adam, smacking the side of Worms's head. “Don't get all deep.”

Worms picks up his fork and continues eating.

After dessert Yolanda walks me to the door. “You sure you're okay?”

I shrug my coat onto my shoulders and give her a grim smile. “Thanks a lot for doing this. I really appreciate it.”

She hesitates, then digs in the rear pocket of her jeans for a piece of paper, which she hands to me.

“He's in my yoga class,” Yolanda says. “He's a little stiff in the upper back—most businessmen are—but he's pretty limber for a guy with a stable job. He's cute, and he's looking for someone. I gave him your number.”

In a neat blue script, orderly but masculine, is the name “Dan Cooper.” And a phone number. The paper floats on my open palm, neither accepted nor rejected. The slightest breeze from a fan could blow it away, but there is no breeze. The paper rests on my palm, and I know George isn't coming back.

Dan Cooper sits opposite me, buttering a roll. He is a thoughtful, good-looking, perfectly nice man.

“I graduated from Harvard in eighty-seven,” he answers. “But I didn't go straight to law school. Before that I took a year off to bike.”

“That must have been interesting,” I say automatically—then, with a surge of restless energy, I preempt his response. “Not
really. Actually it was a stationary bike.
”

He holds the roll in midair for a full second. Then he laughs politely. “Oh, no. I biked all over the Pacific Northwest. I'm very passionate about the environment.”

He bites into his roll, and chews.

Elizabeth's voice is so wan I strain to hear. “Thank you for coming.” Dressed in a pale blue button-down shirt and baggy sweatpants, her wet hair smelling like baby shampoo, she seems more like an undergraduate on study break than a recent discharge from a locked psychiatric unit.

As I hang my coat and set down my briefcase in the apartment's narrow entryway, Mary appears with a steaming mug. She passes me the tea with both hands and the sotto voce greeting “Hot.”

I blow on my tea. The moist heat reflects upward to my brow and cools there, leaving me lightheaded. I don't know why I'm here. I could have taken Jeff's advice and refused Mary's request, but I didn't, didn't even consider refusing. It would be a lie to say I'm here on a mission of mercy. It's more selfish than that. I need Elizabeth, for some urgent unarticulated reason, to snap out of it.

“Thanks,” says Elizabeth for the third time. “For coming.” She turns and walks ahead of us into the living room.

“There haven't been other visitors,” Mary explains.

“The grad students are probably spooked,” I say to Mary. “People get superstitious. Which is no excuse.”

She seems unperturbed by the absence of Elizabeth's fellow students. Without another word she turns to follow her daughter. She reminds me, I think with yet another flash of anger, of my own mother. Too passive to shout, storm, question. My mother, whose primary response to my breakup, other than a few phrases of puzzled sympathy that sounded like reproach, was
Your father will be so disappointed.

Another insomniac night has left me frazzled. Balancing my tea with care, I follow Mary down the narrow corridor and into Elizabeth's apartment.

I'd pictured Elizabeth breaking down in a florid jumble, tearing wallpaper from her Fort Greene walls like the Charlotte Perkins Gilman heroine. Instead her apartment is impeccably neat, decorated with Shaker-like austerity. White sheets shroud two floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Mary's hand is evident, too, in the bare desktop, all evidence of literary striving presumably sealed into the cardboard box in the corner, marked
PAPERS
. The apartment is a literary crime scene. My eyes wander repeatedly to the box. I find myself thinking of the gems of observation trapped there, attained at such cost to Elizabeth.

Seated on the sofa, Elizabeth is utterly still. Her lips are pale and her blinks so slow and infrequent that I find myself anticipating each with mounting disquiet.