The Sixteenth of June Page 3

  If his own situation felt a little less adventuresome, it was mitigated by what he read. He couldn’t contribute stories of building wells in Nigeria, but he could joke about his unwashed roommate, Andres, who smelled permanently of wet wool and goat, or his Marxist professor who decided to conduct an experiment of the proletariat by having his students grade themselves. These were the ridiculous tales of being twenty-two and twenty-five, of being in that happy, malleable phase of postcollege life before everything set in the gray cement of adulthood.

  True, he was a little more mired than his friends, ankle deep while they went globe-trotting and job-hopping, but he didn’t mind. Indeed, he took pride in it. He was the only one he knew who had gone straight to grad school from college, even using the summer after graduating to take intensive German.

  His ego (das Ich!) rallied around his work ethic. He was the most on track of his classmates back then, and he felt the pure certainty of an evangelical Christian politely declining booze and drugs. Poking his head out from his cave in the quarterly glimpse afforded by the class notes, he would return to his studies feeling gratified.

  And when he occasionally attended an alumni event, the Yale Connect! postcards coaxing him out, he saw his success reflected in their faces. “You’re in a PhD program?” they would ask resentfully. “And you’re in your third year already?” He would feign embarrassment, nod at the floor.

  He had been impressive for a solid stint there, a postcollege golden era. But then news of grad school acceptances started trickling in. Someone had gotten into Princeton, he would see with a frown, and he had to soothe himself with reminders that he was in his fourth year, coursework completed. (“I got an incredibly generous offer from Penn,” he imagined himself saying to the Princeton snot, with the barest suggestion that he’d been lured away from Harvard.)

  Then he was in his fifth year. And his sixth. Any lead he had felt squandered. How quickly he had gone from being the early bird to the dawdler. “You’re already studying for comp exams?” had once been uttered aghast in bars. Now it was a cheerful “Still working on the old diss, eh, Stephen?” with a buck-up tone of pity.

  And that was it. The alreadys! had turned into stills? The exclamation points, those jealous stabs of hysterical punctuation, had rounded into questioning sneers. It was no wonder he had let the spring issue of the alumni magazine sit untouched. Who needed to see the news trumpeted of more nuptials and neurologists? Their degrees trailed behind them like shoes from a rear bumper. Gone was the playful sense that their activities might be abandoned for more hip pursuits. Paul Yu & Co. were in it for good.

  “You are almost thirty now,” his grandmother had observed on Tuesday. She said it wistfully, and Stephen felt caught between the troubling possibilities that she was either reminding herself of this fact, to ground the balloon of her wandering mind, or was reminding him. And so he had held his tongue rather than reply—as he normally would—that he knew his own age perfectly well. He nodded in polite agreement, as he did that whole afternoon.

  He shifts his umbrella to the other hand. Gone now.

  Just days ago he had stood in her room. Days, hours. How many minutes had it been?

  Standing by her bed, he had felt paralyzed, unsure if he should attempt a final good-bye. Would it offend her? Would it diminish her chances? So he had remained mute, not realizing he would regret what he didn’t say more than what he did.

  She had likely taken his reticence as a sign that the end was near. Michael and June visited that same evening, and he imagines them standing by her bed with bowed heads, deferential at last. In death, you were a victor.

  Then there was the place itself. Pine Grove. They probably all have similar names. Shady Oaks. Cypress Point. Maple Valley. Nursing homes and country clubs like to affiliate with trees. But there was a dignity there, the kind of hushed reverence he normally associates with libraries and museums.

  “Not too shabby, eh?” Grandma Portman had prodded, watching him take it in when he first visited. It was the week after 9/11. He had decided to check on her after learning that his parents had no intention of visiting.

  He lent his grandmother his elbow as they strolled the grounds. He had been expecting a dilapidated building that smelled of antiseptic, threadbare common rooms emanating despair, but this was more like college, with its sprawling campus and tennis courts. They stood together on the crest of a gently sloping hill. “It was good of you to come, bubeleh,” she said, squeezing his arm. They gazed at the weeping willows, the IN MEMORIAM benches beneath. Stephen, touched by how pleased she was to see him, felt bizarrely close to tears.

  “God, it’s so scary,” Nora had said of the attacks. “I was worried my mom’s chemo would get disrupted, with all the chaos at the hospitals.”

  “Right,” he replied awkwardly. Nora had tunnel vision. Not even those towers could get her to look up from her mother’s sickbed.

  It occurred to him, standing on that hill, that he hadn’t confided in Nora in weeks. He had fallen into the role of listener. He didn’t fault her for being preoccupied with her mother, but selfishly, he missed her. She was becoming less available to him as a friend, and he sensed her fading in some way he couldn’t pinpoint.

  Meanwhile, his grandmother seemed so delighted to have him there. He remembered her as being stern when he was a boy, but any trace of severity had vanished from her face, softened by age. And then there was the matter of the new head bob.

  It was probably involuntary, some sort of neuromuscular twitch. Her head went like a basketball at times: nod nod nod. It must have been uncomfortable, but she said nothing of it. Stephen had come to see her, and that was all that mattered, yes? Her head bounced along in agreement, all the repressed affirmations from a lifetime released at the mere sight of him.

  So he walked with her, dutifully following her. Down the hall, through a glass atrium, the corridors drenched in light. He felt a strange sense of familiarity, as though in a dream.

  His plan for that visit had been to make a quick escape. He would make sure she was okay and deposit the box of cookies from Metropolitan Bakery. “I have office hours at four,” he had warned her. But sitting there, the grounds stretching past her window in a vista, he found himself settling into his wingback chair. He talked with her about the events of the past week, how angered he was by the politicians and the talking heads. “I was born in New York,” he said. “And here are all these people in Texas and Alabama discussing it like it’s their tragedy. Like they’re allowed to speak for the victims!” She nodded sagely.

  They continued talking, their discussion lightening as the sky grew dark. He told her about teaching, that sea of alien faces smirking at him. How they fidgeted, turning in papers that were a collective atrocity. And this at an Ivy League school! Next he was going on about his committee, the fatiguing levels of ass-kissing its members required. He felt as if he were getting a degree in babysitting, in appeasement, in coddling. “Stephen, don’t you have office hours?” she interrupted, glancing at the clock. “No one ever comes anyway,” he replied hastily, reaching for a cookie. He thought he saw a momentary gleam in her eye, but she said nothing, her head bobbing away.

  And so what began as a pleasant surprise of a visit, a that-wasn’t-so-bad sort of visit, became a routine. He went monthly at first, then a bit more often. Until finally, by the time Leo and Nora got engaged, he was going every Tuesday, a ritual as comforting as attending synagogue.

  He told himself he was being a good grandson. Responsible. Slightly heroic, even. But when he purchased his ten-trip ticket at the urine-scented kiosk, he didn’t feel the weight of obligation. Grasping that ticket, he felt free.

  He looked forward to the meditative rocking of the train. He had come to know its rhythm: the particular place where the electricity might cut out for a moment before surging back; the moment when the train left the rickety tracks of Thirtieth Street and pick
ed up speed. The conductor, punching tickets as he teetered down the aisle, always nodded at him in recognition.

  With each stop, the town names rang out overhead: Chessssssstnut Hill! Noooooorristown! This bellowing struck Stephen as quaint, a throwback to an era of transport involving steamer trunks and porters. By the time Pine Grove’s stop approached, a feeling of goodwill found its way to him and he felt lighter, jauntier.

  There was none of that buzz in the air at Pine Grove, the incessant hum of reachability. Around him now, the commuters thumbing their phones seem tethered to some invisible force, as though at any moment the great cord of connectivity might give a tug and yank them off the platform. The Times recently ran an article on the growing number of people who check email first thing in the morning. It was a rising demographic, he read. He pictured Leopold scowling at his phone while shuffling to the bathroom in that foul old robe.

  It was the sort of thing he could have shared with his grandmother on a typical Tuesday, a normal Tuesday, when he hadn’t been informed by phone that she likely only had twenty-four hours left. She would have sighed. “We are becoming half-robots,” she would have said knowingly.

  Pine Grove offered him a respite. Each time he walked along the gravel path to its campus, he would be reminded of a leafy sanctuary: college, Central Park. The rush to pair off, to win—it all fell away. No one was in a panic to get to that last chair before the music stopped. No one was in a rush at all.

  Today, it is all different: a new train line, a strange set of names clacking on the signboard. Vendors at coffee carts parked along the platform dole out coffee and plastic-wrapped bagels in a steady stream. Accustomed to the station’s sleepy noontime calm, Stephen feels unnerved by the harried morning bustle. It occurs to him that he will miss the ritual of his visits as much as he will miss her.

  He enters the train after everyone else. The car smells of baked damp, black umbrellas drying at the feet of their owners like small dogs. A heavy spatter hits as the train lurches forward. The weather forecast, following the Bloomsday report, had mentioned the possibility of hail. Stephen takes comfort in this. The skies should darken for Grandma Portman, a terrible morning to atone for their terrible mourning.

  She had gone more gently than he would have thought possible. No battles or resuscitating. “As little suffering as we can hope for,” Miriam Maxwell, Pine Grove’s director, had told him, and he understood that he was supposed to feel grateful.

  “Tickets!” the conductor cries.

  It was Miriam who had called him on Tuesday morning. Stephen was groggy when he answered the phone and felt a second behind everything she said. “Twenty-four hours left?” he repeated. “How could you possibly know that?” Yet he registered her calm, the quiet space she gave him on the line, and realized she must make these calls often.

  He still didn’t believe her when he went to Pine Grove that afternoon. His grandmother had never fully recovered from the embolism, but just recently he had thought that she was starting to look better. She had died at dawn on Wednesday, alone.

  The conductor looks menacing as he comes forward, snapping the jaws of his punch. The expert commuters all have their tickets out, badges of veteran experience. Stephen unfurls the receipt of his one-way peak fare, a scroll with a hieroglyph of symbols. He’d been informed at the information desk that his ten-trip ticket couldn’t be used. Four unpunched slots remain: [7] [8] [9] [10]. He’d never imagined that he might not use it in its entirety. How long will it sit now in his wallet, a reminder?

  The conductor swipes his receipt, punches it, and walks off with it in hand, muttering, “Tickets! Tickets!” Stephen does not have a chance to object, to ask if he will need it later, much less to inquire—as he had planned—if cabs are available at his stop. The synagogue is three miles from the station, he had been told.

  Next Tuesday, he reflects. Tuesday will be the longest day.

  A rustle of paper from the man seated beside him, scrawling away on a yellow legal pad. Stephen watches him, his pen flying. Stephen needs for the ride to be productive. He knows this but resists it. He hates toting around his briefcase on the day of her funeral.

  But life didn’t stop for her. His EGL 220 class had continued, Stephen standing in front of them on Thursday (yesterday! Just yesterday) feeling drained. The show must go on, he had thought, leaning on the lectern.

  He could have canceled class; no one would have faulted him. But he’s been putting in the bare minimum as it is. His lectures have grown shorter. He grades hastily. Paradoxically, this has resulted in his students’ perking up, deciding he isn’t so bad. The less of himself he puts into the class, it seems, the more they like him.

  His briefcase holds a thick stack of Milton essays in one compartment and a thin sheath of dissertation notes in the other. It isn’t a choice, really. He can’t bear to face his proposal. He isn’t sufficiently caffeinated, adrenaline-charged, amped. It will likely sit untouched until the last possible moment: 2:00 a.m., the night before a meeting with Stuart, nervous energy flooding his system as he curses himself for having neglected it.

  His efforts thus far have yielded little more than multicolored stickies in various books. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern had achieved the status of a sea creature, teeming with colorful protrusions like a coral reef. Meanwhile, titles flit through his mind, which he jots down in his notebook. Long paragraphs should be filling it. Instead he has single lines with clumsy edits:

  The Caves Behind the Characters: Interiority in Virginia Woolf

  The Unwritten Novel: Subjectivity in Woolf (and Eliot?)

  The Parallax View: The Subject’s Gaze in Woolf and Eliot in Modernism

  Stephen isn’t clear on what the parallax view is, but he had spotted it while skimming Žižek. Citing Slavoj Žižek makes him feel brave, those Eastern European consonants, with their feel of currency. Žižek: cha-ching! The snappy syllables make Stephen a theorist, one of those hip academics who wears Doc Martens and participates in protests.

  Stephen’s dissertation will involve Virginia Woolf. This much he knows. Increasingly, there is Freud, creeping in like a draft from a window, but Stephen does not mind. There is poetry in the Freud, and his German is finally coming in handy.

  The rest is up in the air, a nebulous mix that makes him feel as though he is trying to capture the weather in a net. He has moments when he thinks he is onto something. These occur late at night, his mind igniting, surrounded by books. It is a heady feeling, thinking he has the thread of something, that he need only hold on. “So, too, Woolf implies with all fiction writing: our subjects always escape, leaving us only with the truth of our impressions.” YES!!! he writes in the margin. He goes to bed exhausted but satisfied, relieved that he has made some progress.

  But in the morning, he cannot decipher his notes. “The novel is always unwritten, coming apart,” reads one sticky note. What on earth does it mean? None of the previous night’s understanding comes back to him. The Writer as Reader in Modernism has been added to his list of titles. He is embarrassed by his chicken scratchings, by the spark he felt. Who will ever read these words? What is their point?

  Across the aisle he notices a woman gazing out the window as they bump along. She wears a wool coat, and her toddler leans against her, on her way to sleep. The girl’s shoes point up at the ceiling; she is small enough that her legs don’t meet the seat’s edge. Her hair spills across her mother’s coat, laced with static. A folded stroller sits on the luggage rack above them along with a patterned diaper bag.

  A bump causes the electricity to flicker, and Stephen realizes he has been staring. Always this. Watching people around him and wondering, wondering instead of working. But the woman gazing out the window captivates him more than anything in his briefcase.

  Stephen’s work does not call out to him in this way. It does not speak to him of secrets and stories. He wonders about the
woman. He imagines a divorce, something that makes her look away rather than stroke her daughter’s hair. To know more about her would be to have some riddle solved. An unwritten novel is in each of us, Woolf would say.

  The people at the funeral today will smile blankly if he tries to explain any of this. They will remember the term papers they wrote in college. They will think what he does is frivolous.

  Stephen sighs and unclasps his briefcase. For the first time, the legal-pad activity pauses. He can feel his seat companion take in the rubber-banded stack of essays, surveying them with interest. Teacher? Writer? Stephen is glad the top essay has Professor Portman typed in the upper-right corner.

  He will grade the papers as quickly as he can, a benevolent line at the end of each with some mix of positive and negative to indicate the tip of the grade. He will put his head down, mirroring the intense concentration of the man beside him, and work until the name of his destination rings out.

  At the synagogue he will embrace his parents and pay his respects to his grandmother. Only you, he thinks. Only you knew how much I will miss you. He bows his head for the grandmother he has lost. As if it is not for some part of himself, too, that he mourns.

  Four

  Seven years. Nora gazes out the window, watching the trees roll past.

  Saying the number aloud that morning had come as a shock. How had she lived through those years without ever doing the math? Of course it was seven, but it had somehow felt like one, darkening until the lights went out. She and her mom had been stranded on an island, the tropic of cancer with its thickets of growth, while for everyone else life continued, unerring and plain.

  Does knowing the number help? Do you have to feel the slap a thousand times to grow numb to it? The words of the song come back to her. The very thought of you / And I forget to do / The little ordinary things / That everyone ought to do.