The Sixteenth of June Page 7

  He arches a brow for effect. “Is that your two cents?”

  She groans. “Awful!”

  “I wonder, actually, how much it would work out to.”

  “The kind of question your dad would love.”

  Nora is right. His dad would relish the merging of economics and English. And the mileage he would get from it! “Currency was actually a precious metal back then,” Michael would expound at cocktail parties. “Worth its weight in gold.”

  “Hopefully he’ll be okay tonight,” Nora adds.

  Stephen snorts. “Don’t you start. Tonight was his idea, though everyone acts like he’s falling on his sword.”

  But she had been there, just days ago. Wednesday, the news of Grandma Portman’s death still raw, Stephen’s head whirling that the nursing home had predicted it so accurately. How did they know? (“An event like a pulmonary embolism—it’s debilitating to the body at that age,” Miriam Maxwell had reminded him gently. Yes, yes, he wanted to tell her. You’ve been telling us that all along. But it wasn’t supposed to actually apply.) Just as he was feeling a wash of regret, thinking that they should have done more for her, that maybe they could have prevented her death, Michael looked up from the dinner table and announced the plan to move forward with the party.

  “You’re not serious,” Stephen sputtered.

  “This,” Michael said calmly, “is my choice to make.”

  All right, Stephen thought angrily. We’ll have the precious party and pretend. Leo was eating noisily, paying them no mind, while Nora sat staring at her plate.

  “Is there a reason,” she’d asked hesitantly, “why the funeral can’t be Saturday?”

  Michael explained about the Sabbath while Nora reddened, mortified. Meanwhile, it was never even suggested that the party be moved. God forbid Bloomsday be celebrated a day late.

  “I know it’s what he said,” Nora says now. “I just wonder if he’s in shock.”

  Stephen watches her and sighs. She was probably imagining Michael going through what she had, as if we all process loss the same way. You give him too much credit, he wants to tell her.

  It was Nora who had shuddered at the cemetery when the earth hit the coffin. Michael stood with the shovel as though posing for a photograph, his expression stoic. Did he feel powerful in that moment? Was there some relief—perhaps even pleasure—in finally burying his past?

  “She wouldn’t have minded,” June had said at the dinner table, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “Can’t you just hear her? ‘No, no, don’t cancel for me. You go ahead with your plans.’ In a way . . . ,” June tested the thought before speaking it. “In a way we will be honoring her, doing exactly as she would have instructed.”

  Stephen felt aghast listening to these self-justifications. But after hiding his visits to Pine Grove for so long, how could he speak up? He sat there silently, poking at the oily flesh of his salmon, tasting only his own cowardice. At that moment, had she begun to rot? Could she sense his final betrayal from the grave? But Grandma Portman was probably used to it. He pretended not to know her when she visited Delancey. He was no better than the rest of them.

  “Shivah,” Nora says, interrupting his thoughts. “Isn’t that Indian?”

  Stephen smiles.

  “Oh, you laugh! But how am I supposed to know? You’d probably tell me about some Judaic-Hindu connection.”

  It is good to see some color in her face. All day she has been drawn, pale, as though someone took a remote control and dimmed brightness, color, volume. Meanwhile, Leo had introduced her around as if it were the county fair. “Any day now!” he said, nudging her, as though she were a blue-ribbon pig ready for slaughter. “Any day!”

  “And how are you holding up?” Stephen gives her a sidelong glance. He doesn’t need to say it.

  “I don’t know. Fine, I guess.” She flips the visor down to examine her reflection. “I talked about her funeral this morning for the first time. So that’s a sign of progress, right?”

  “This was with your shrink?” Stephen knows that Nora has been seeing someone new. Ben Franklin for your thoughts indeed. “What did he say? Or she?”

  “Nothing. He’s not really one for saying much.”

  “Ah. A talk therapist.” Stephen wonders if he is a Freudian, one of those who sets you on a divan and makes you face the other way. “Freud used to dispense cocaine to his patients, you know. He administered it through the gums. Loosening the lips, so to speak.”

  Nora laughs. “I was definitely not snorting coke.”

  “Can you imagine? There were probably a bunch of addicts wandering through Vienna, twitching and scratching themselves, wanting to pull their hair out.” Stephen hears the words come out before he can call them back. He stops, horrified.

  “You’d build a loyal client base,” she says lightly. “A high referral rate, I imagine.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nora. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay.” Stephen feels the air between them settle. “I don’t know if anything helps, honestly. It’s not like taking a car in to the mechanic. ‘We got it! Problem solved!’ ” She wipes her hands clean, and her voice sounds uncannily like Leo’s: cheerful, upbeat.

  “Maybe it’s something you always battle. There are people who fight depression, anxiety. They find things that work.”

  “But nothing works! She died almost a year ago. A whole year! And here I am, barely holding it together. Sometimes I worry it only gets worse.”

  “Who’s to say there’s a time limit on grief ? Maybe you have to feel worse before you can feel better.”

  “I just—I keep waiting for things to feel normal again. But what if they never do?” Nora gazes out the open car door. “Honestly, the only time I feel like myself is when I perform. Which is weird, right?”

  “I’ve seen you sing. The place could catch fire and you wouldn’t notice.”

  Nora laughs. He remembers first hearing her, in his room at Branford. He had heard her voice coming through the pipes, but when he opened his door, there was nothing. Some sort of trick of sound, the strange acoustics of the old dorm. He wandered upstairs, ducking a Frisbee, the blast of the Spice Girls, a group of freshmen dancing in their pajamas while laughing hysterically. Turning a corner, he finally heard a trickle of her undulating soprano and followed it to its source. He stood in her doorway, watching. The sheet music was spread before her, though her eyes were closed.

  She paused to make a notation with a pencil from behind her ear. He cleared his throat. “Too loud?” she asked, unembarrassed.

  “You’re amazing,” he blurted.

  She laughed.

  “It sounds familiar.” He gestured toward the score.

  “Lakmé,” she said, pencil in midair. “But stolen shamefully by British Airways. You’ve probably heard it in their commercials.”

  Just like that they’d become friends. Stephen doesn’t remember what came next—how that conversation led to another, whether they had dinner or went for a walk. He cannot recall what followed. But the memory of that pure soprano pouring out of her—that memory arrests him still.

  “It makes sense,” he adds now. “We find comfort in the things we love.”

  “Like writing?”

  “Ugh. Don’t ask.”

  They haven’t talked about his proposal. He’s been skipping Sunday brunches under the pretense of work. Meanwhile he paces his room, sitting at his desk only to stand again. Once or twice, a thump has come through the floorboards, broom against ceiling, the downstairs neighbor telling him to quit it.

  Maybe it is how his grandmother feels: trapped one floor beneath, haunted by the racket above. Is there rest in death, or does the noise continue? Apparently the hair and nails continue to grow, not having received the message to stop, the cells oblivious.

  Stephen feels Nora eyeing him. He sighs. “It’s
just—it’s like putting the cart before the horse. You can’t state what a project is about before writing it. You write to figure it out. The proposal is this weird parlor trick: summarize your dissertation ahead of time! It’s like trying to describe the child from the womb.” He catches her smiling. “What?”

  “I was counting the analogies. Three so far. Anyway, I know you have some sense of your topic. I’ve heard you talk about it.”

  “Not enough to fill thirty pages.”

  Meanwhile, his adviser has been encouraging him to incorporate Ulysses. “Your project would be incomplete without it!” Stuart said. “Especially if you’re discussing the parallax view. Besides which, your parents would be thrilled.” “It’s bad enough they named us after the characters,” Stephen replied. “Just be glad they didn’t go with Dedalus,” Stuart pointed out. “But there is a Dedalus!” Stephen informed him. “That’s what they named the golden retriever. He shits on the kitchen floor once a week.” At this Stuart had laughed, laughed in such a way that Stephen knew he had just bought himself another month.

  “Oh, fuck. Stuart.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m just remembering—my adviser. I think he’s coming tonight.” It seemed unavoidable at the time. “So tell me,” Stuart had said, “do your parents have anything planned for the big centennial?” “Your invitation’s already in the mail,” Stephen had replied smoothly, making a mental note to have his mother send one.

  The part he hasn’t told Stuart is that other doubts have been arising as well. “Do you ever worry that this stuff doesn’t matter?” Stephen wants to ask him. “Do you ever wish you did something normal?”

  “You’ll be fine, you know,” Nora remarks. “You always do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Work yourself up. Get all agitated. Wring your hands.”

  Stephen is about to protest that he isn’t “all agitated,” but then looks down to see himself wringing his hands. “This is different. It’s not just the proposal. I’m having doubts about the whole enterprise.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I wonder about all of it. If I should be doing something else. The thing about grad school is that you need to be committed. I started out so focused. But now—it feels pointless.”

  He thinks of the woman on the train, consumed with her own worries. He thinks of his cousins working minimum-wage jobs. George, his stepuncle, had made an effort to ask about his teaching. George listened, nodded. “She’s better where she is,” he said after a pause, as though seeing straight through to Stephen’s grief. George always had an eye for suffering.

  “No one else seems filled with doubts,” Stephen continues. In his department, his peers seem like they are on autopilot. Emily, a pale Victorianist, writes long comments on her students’ papers while sipping tea composedly by her enormous potted fern. Marisel, a plump Latina, prattles on about cosmopolitanism in her too-tight jeans, her cellphone occasionally working its way out of her pocket from the sheer thrusting force of her backside. Josh, perpetually clad in ironic T-shirts, is a skittish fan of the postmodern novel. All of them feel like walking clichés. And what would that make Stephen?

  He cannot bear the thought of being a stereotype. The worst part is that Leo would agree with him. “What good is something unless it improves people’s lives?” Stephen could ask, and Leo would look relieved that his brother was finally talking sense.

  Leo’s eyes glaze over when Stephen talks about his research: “I’m trying to think about a theory of subjectivity in Woolf. Characters are always displacing themselves. They shuttle between past and future, caught in a memory but then thrown into the present, as though at any instant—” And Stephen will feel the image come over him. As though at any instant we are a handful of leaves, scattered by time.

  But then he’ll sense his brother stifling a yawn. You see! he wants to cry. You’re doing it now! Here, but elsewhere. Standing here, listening to me, but imagining the emails you need to write, the wedding venue you want to show Nora. Who knows where people go off to in their heads? Thoughts intrude. A conversation is no simple thing. We are in a thousand places at any moment.

  If Leo was haunted by past or future, he didn’t show it. “Maybe people aren’t so complicated,” he’d say. “Maybe it’s just you.”

  If someone asked Leo what he did for a living, he would smile. “I’m an IT consultant.” With just the right touch of modesty he’d describe how he was a manager, running through the “workplace solutions” his firm offers.

  Ah, the person would nod. Yes, I see. Leo’s job fit into something broader, was part of an apparatus, a complex machine of interlocking parts. He went out into the world and contributed to it, producing software so that other companies could use that software and perform better. Products and efficiency and lives were improved, jobs begetting jobs, the furnace of the American economy burning to keep everyone warm.

  How is what you do work? This is the unsaid question people direct Stephen’s way. He isn’t a coal miner or a surgeon. His father had an impressive career in finance. His mother, for all her faults, bore children. What is Stephen’s contribution?

  “You don’t feel you are accomplished?” Grandma Portman had asked, listening to these questions and peering at him.

  “I don’t feel like what I do matters.”

  “Ah. Well. I was a housewife. When we compare, no one holds up. ‘So what’ is an annihilating question.”

  That was the thing about his grandmother. She could hit you with a line like that and stop you cold.

  “You give yourself too hard of a time,” Nora says beside him. “If you find something you love, that’s enough.”

  “I give myself a hard time?”

  Nora smiles.

  Soon, the synagogue basement will empty. He and Nora had snuck out. She had a spare set of keys for the car in her purse.

  He didn’t need to give Nora an excuse to leave, but the trays of cold cuts and the two-liter bottles of soda had done it. The tacky supermarket food. He knew his parents were preoccupied with the party. But when he saw that afterthought of a spread—which they would never have permitted for something that mattered to them—he understood their heartlessness.

  “Life is strange,” he says, folding his arms across his chest. “I bet my grandmother never imagined ending up in Pennsylvania, of all places. How does it happen? You have such dreams when you’re a kid. And then you find yourself teaching some idiotic composition class, grading papers on the train.”

  He recalls that book of proverbs with its blue cloth. The sayings it tracked weren’t necessarily elegant or clever; they were simply what had pervaded. “Do people end up doing what they love? I’m not so sure. And why is that? It’s as if life comes preprogrammed. We seem to go with the defaults, even if it means being miserable.” As though when reaching for words, we can only grasp at what’s already there: grasp at straws, offer pennies for thoughts. As though life would not meet us if we were to leap.

  But Stephen cannot bring himself to say more, to follow the path of his thoughts. Not today.

  The idea had come to him after his last visit with his grandmother. He could go to New York.

  It was a preposterous idea, but it had taken up residence, and he found himself returning to it. He began to wonder about writing his dissertation from afar. You can write anywhere, he realized. It was such an obvious thought, but it had never occurred to him before. He could email Stuart his chapters, take the train in for meetings. Why not? What was keeping him in Philly? The only person he would miss was Nora.

  Then another, more dangerous thought entered his mind. She could come, too.

  Oh, it was unthinkable. He could never do such a thing, could never even suggest it jokingly. But it has become a daydream, one that’s startlingly vivid. He can picture the two of them in a small apartment, more cramped than the
one he is already in, but somehow more charming for it. He imagines clacking away at a typewriter with a mug of tea, a scarf around his neck. He imagines Nora coming home from auditions. He imagines her practicing with her sheet music, a pencil behind her ear.

  “It’s better not to think too much,” Nora remarks. He turns to look at her. “I know how that sounds. Maybe it’s Leo’s influence, what he would say. But me and you—we think everything to death. You can sit around contemplating life forever, but meanwhile it continues. So you might as well have chosen something and made the best of it.”

  A ringing endorsement for marriage. But Stephen has vowed since the engagement to keep his mouth shut.

  He knows he will lose her, too. She will go out to Ardmore or Gladwyne, one of those bucolic suburbs Leo loves. She will end up locked away in her “might as well.”

  When Leo lays out his visions for them, Nora never frowns or looks away uncomfortably; they never fight over their future, so far as Stephen can tell. It is endearing to hear Leo describe it: the house, the oaks, the hairless limbs of toddlers in a blur of motion. He speaks of it with a grin, knowing that he is signing them up for a certain kind of chaos. “Three kids?” June had said, stricken. “Really?”

  But Nora doesn’t see that the vision rests on her back. Leo will continue with his job, continue bathing his beloved car. His commute will be easier, his life generally improved for the addition of wife and house and kids. He’ll watch sports and hang out with the guys. Nora will be the one forced to sacrifice, subtly at first, the water getting incrementally warmer until it is at a boil.

  We stake our place in this world. Isn’t that what Grandma Portman had been trying to tell him? “To be a housewife is to become the result of everyone else’s decisions,” she had said.

  It is what he feels happening around him, their choices narrowing. It all got decided somehow, fate urging you along, daring you to accept its nudge.

  When he tries to hint at some of his doubts to Stuart, his adviser merely nods and says, “Just so, Stephen. Just so.” Just once, Stephen wants Stuart to pause, to clear his throat. To say, “Well, of course, you don’t mean that now, do you?” He wants Stuart to remove his glasses and look at him, frowning. Instead, Stephen’s every concern is deemed proof that he’s in the right place. Stuart often had a nostalgic smile playing about his lips, as though recalling his own similar frustrations. If Stephen were to tell Stuart tonight that he wants to drop out, Stuart would probably nod, bemused, and say, “Well said, Stephen. That’s exactly it.”