We Are Not Ourselves (17 page)

“I think I’m going to cancel class,” he said. “I’m not feeling it.”

“Huh?”

He hadn’t missed a class in twenty years. They’d had fights about it.
You can miss a single class
, she would say when something came up.
They can’t fire you for it. They can’t fire you, period.

“I think I’ve earned a day off,” he said.

“Well, either way, just come to bed. It’s late.”

She stood over him until he got up. They shuffled down the hall together. In the morning when she woke he was sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Maybe you’d better call for me,” he said.

After she’d made the call, she showered and dressed. When she headed to the kitchen, she saw him lying on the couch again, as if he hadn’t moved from the night before, the only difference being the cup of tea on the table.

“You’re taking this whole ‘taking it easy’ thing pretty seriously,” she said.

“I’m just gathering my energy,” he said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow.”

He let himself be kissed good-bye. She went to work. When she returned she was surprised to find him in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. She hadn’t really believed he’d stay home all day; it was unlike him. His record of never missing work was a matter of somber pride. Connell’s bag and jacket were slung over a chair in the dining room.

Ed’s eyes were closed. His feet beat the time. She stood over him, tapped him on the shoulder. As she spoke, he motioned to the headphones to indicate he couldn’t hear her. She mimed pulling them off her ears.

“I’m listening to music,” he said.

“Plainly.”

“How was work?”

“Work was fine,” she said. “Did you stay there all day?”

“I got up to eat.”

“So this is the new thing?”

“I’m trying it out. I’m feeling enormously refreshed.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said.

“I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs,” he said. “This is step one. I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”

“What about work?”

“I’m going to need you to call in again for me tomorrow.”

In the big mirror in the other room she saw herself in the coat she’d been meaning to replace. She had once thought of thirty as a terribly old age, but now she was turning fifty at the end of the year, and thirty seemed impossibly young.

“How long do you plan to do this?”

“I hadn’t formulated a plan.”

“Shall I expect you to eat with us tonight?”

“Of course,” he said, waving her off and putting the headphones back on.

As she began to prepare dinner, she reflected on what this thing could be. It was clearly some kind of midlife crisis. Something was spooking him: getting old, probably. She was confident it wasn’t another woman. They were
coconspirators in a mission of normalcy. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life. She knew he was reliable, and not only because he wasn’t going to miss work to sleep off a drunk, or gamble his paycheck at the track, or forget their anniversary. He was, in a subtler way, reliably knowable. Some women yearned for a hint of mystery about their men; she loved Ed’s lack of mystery. It had shade, depth, texture; it was just complex enough. His heart contained too little passion for him to attempt a grand affair, and too much for him to endure a scurrilous one. He was too preoccupied with his work to love two women at once; he lacked that tolerance for superficial interaction every successful adulterer wielded.

A few days later he returned to work, but the headphones ritual persisted in the evenings. One night he returned to his study, and she felt relieved. She
assumed he was grading lab reports, but when she went in to bring him a plate of cookies she found him writing in a notebook, which he took pains to block from her view. When she went back later that night to look for it, it was gone.

•  •  •

Their dinners began to feel strange to her. Ed looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and he never wanted to talk about his work—or about anything, really, but Connell’s day and the happenings at school.

“And then,” Connell said, “they lifted him up to grab the rim, but they didn’t give him the ball to dunk. Somebody pulled his shorts down. And then they pulled his underwear down! He just hung up there until Mr. Cotswald ran over and got him.”

“Ha!”

Ed laughed with just a bit too much gusto. She’d expected him to condemn the boys’ behavior. It was as if he hadn’t really absorbed what Connell had said. Something in the warmth in his voice, the distraction that flickered in his eyes, made her wonder if she’d been too hasty in ruling out an affair. A listlessness had come over him lately that seemed at times like a species of dreaminess.

“Well.” Ed pushed back his chair. He gave Connell a perfunctory pat on the head and retired to the couch and the privacy of his headphones. Connell looked embarrassed, as if he’d extended a hand for a shake and been rebuffed. She knew enough not to compound it by speaking to him.

She went to bed feeling frowsy. She squeezed the deposits of fat at her hips and wondered how they had managed to sneak up on her. She knew the doctors at work still turned to look at her in the halls, but if Ed didn’t see her that way, then the interest of other men felt less a vote of confidence than a shabby habit that in its mindless lack of differentiation—she saw the way they looked at so many of the girls—called into question whether she had ever been beautiful at all.

Ed came in after midnight. He stood over her, gazing oddly. She could feel herself stiffen.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“Not really,” he said.

“What are you listening to, anyway?”

“Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
. I have so many records I haven’t even cracked the plastic on. It makes me anxious to see them all sitting there. I’m working my way through them.”

She was surprised by how relieved she felt to hear this. It was sufficiently particular to actually be plausible. It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy—retreat to the high ground of a major project.

•  •  •

She had long measured a meal’s success by the range of colors arrayed on the plate, but it felt hopelessly middle-class now to conceive of food in this fashion, and she looked askance at orange carrots, bright green beans, white mashed potatoes, the dark pile of meat and onions, picking at it with her fork in the way she resented in her child.

She used to love to sit at her kitchen table and watch the drapes kick up in the wind, to look through the window across the little divide and see the Palumbos gathered in their dining room, but now the house next door felt far too close. She hated its plain brick face and the shabby décor visible within. She had long tolerated this vulgarity because she felt privileged to have a house at all, but now she found it too disappointing to bear.

Lately she couldn’t stop thinking about Bronxville. When she’d left Lawrence in 1983 for the nursing director job at St. John’s Episcopal in Far Rockaway, she’d missed going to Bronxville every day. When she returned to Einstein a couple of years later to be head of nursing, she’d begun to think the timing might finally be right to move to Bronxville. The commute would be shorter for both of them, she was making good money now, Ed had gotten into a decent pay class himself, and they’d made a few good investments. They had put eight thousand dollars into oil shale stock on the advice of one of Ed’s colleagues, a geologist at NYU, and it had climbed to forty-four thousand. But then in ’85 the shale oil company went bankrupt. That year, they also lost twenty grand on a penny stock scam with First Jersey Securities. The final nail came in 1987, when her boss left for a government appointment, and the new head of the hospital fired those he could and appointed his own leadership team. Though she landed on her feet at North Central Bronx, she had to take a pay cut to do so.

She couldn’t look across at the Palumbos’ just then, with their dreadful chandelier glowing like margarine and the two of them looking all their years as they sat down to a cheerless meal, so she got up to close the drapes. Ed took her rising as a cue that the meal was over and headed for the couch.

•  •  •

When she and Ed moved in, the neighborhood was Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish, and they knew everyone on the block. Then families started to trickle out, and in their place came Colombians, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis. Connell played with the new kids, but she never met the parents. When an Iranian family—they called themselves Persian, but she couldn’t bring herself to refer to them as anything but Iranian—bought her friend Irene’s place up the block after she moved to Garden City, the son, Farshid, became a classmate of Connell’s at St. Joan of Arc and started hanging around the house.

It wasn’t hard to feel the pull of the suburbs, because the neighborhood was half suburb already, arranged around mass transit but also around car travel. There were driveways next to every house, and gas stations and car dealerships at regular intervals along Northern Boulevard. LaGuardia Airport was a short drive away, and Robert Moses’s highways, and the massive parking lots at Shea, and the husk of the World’s Fair, which had left detritus like a glacier.

Most of the stores she loved were gone, replaced by trinket shops, T-shirt shops, fireworks black marketeers, exotic hair salons hidden behind heavy curtains, over-the-counter purveyors of deadly martial arts paraphernalia, comic book stores, karate schools, check-cashing places, Korean-run Optimo-branded cigar and candy stores that sold cheap knockoffs of popular Japanese toys, taxi depots, sketchy bars, fast food, wholesalers of obscure cuisines, restaurants suggestive of opium dens, bodegas stocked with products she would never consider eating. The Boulevard Theatre on the corner was now a Latin dance hall with neon lights flickering late into the night and an insistent beat that hectored the remaining old guard to leave. Cars piled up outside it and the cops were always breaking up fights. The gloomy little Irish bar was the last stand against the invasion, but she couldn’t take some specious pride in it now after avoiding it all these years.

The memory of wealth haunted the nearby garden apartment buildings.
She imagined gaunt bachelors presiding over dwindling fortunes, long lines coming to a silent end. There were remnants of the way it had been, like Barricini’s Chocolates and Jahn’s, but stepping into them only reminded her how few of the old places were left.

She knew it was possible to see the changes as part of what made the city great, an image of what was to come, the necessary cycle of immigration, but only if you weren’t the one being displaced. Maybe even then you could, if you were a saint. She had no desire to be a saint, not if it meant she’d have to blunt the edge of her anger at these people. It certainly wasn’t saintliness that led her to attempt to get past her resentment at the break-in that occurred a couple of years back, while they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. Rather, it was a desire to continue living in the neighborhood without boiling over into outright vitriol whenever she stepped into the grocery store, where anyone she laid eyes on, worker or customer, unless they looked respectable, could have been one of the offenders. She had returned from that cruise to find her jewelry box rifled through and her drawers turned inside out. Luckily, she’d long ago overridden Ed and spent the money to rent a safe deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover, where she stored Ed’s LeCoultre watch and her mother’s embattled engagement ring. All the bonds were in the box as well. She took a certain satisfaction in thinking of how little the thieves had made off with; for once it seemed an advantage that Ed had never been the sort to buy necklaces and bracelets for her birthday or their anniversary. The degenerates had pinched Ed’s stereo, that was true, but he’d needed a new one for years, and this was an excuse for her to buy one for him. She was angry too at the Orlandos, who’d been home at the time. She couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t heard anything, or done anything if they’d heard. What kept her awake some nights, though, fantasizing about revenge, was the fact that they’d taken Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet from the bedroom closet. What could they possibly have wanted with a clarinet? How valuable could such a thing have been on the secondhand market? There was no way they were keeping it for themselves, because the swine wouldn’t know what to do with such a delicate instrument. She pictured them back in their sty of an apartment, surveying their loot, sniffing it, looking at the clarinet’s pieces in stupefaction and dropping them into a garbage can.

She couldn’t blame everything on the latest waves of immigration. Her immediate neighbors had been there longer than she had and both had fallen on tough times. Both houses used to look respectable, if a little dull, with dingy lace curtains in the windows and bleached paint on the trim, but now a rusted-out car sat on blocks in the Palumbos’ backyard, next to a rain-filled drum, and Gene Cooney’s house was under permanent construction, with ugly scaffolding marring the facade and a garden box full of crabgrass and construction debris. Gene stalked the perimeter all day with an edgy intensity, wearing a tool belt around his waist. Wild rumors had sprung up about him and his family, spread by newer residents. He was said to be an IRA arms smuggler lying low. There were whispers about his daughter, who wore short skirts and fishnet stockings and kept nocturnal hours. Eileen knew the truth: he’d gone off the rails after his wife had been killed on Northern Boulevard by a hit-and-run driver, and his daughter wasn’t a prostitute but a girl who had fallen victim to the fashions of the Hispanics she’d grown up around—though one could be forgiven for confusing some of them with hookers.

When she’d first moved onto the block, the garden boxes in front of the houses were lush with flowers in bloom and respectable attempts at horticulture, but many had since returned to the wild, with giant weeds poking up over their walls. She was committed to making hers an oasis against decay, although she hadn’t inherited her father’s sympathy with all manner of vegetable life. Angelo had helped her keep things alive, and she’d picked up a bit of knowledge working alongside him, but ever since his third heart attack had killed him a few years back, she was constantly buying new plants to replace the ones that wilted in the middle of the night.