The Sixteenth of June Read online

  But Nora isn’t so sure they want a dash of perspective. She suspects that they enjoy their high-end issues, as though they themselves are a work of art. They would never want to be common, the Portmans. Even Leo—he is fascinated with the average life because it is novel to him. His blue-collar work ethic is a blue-blood experiment.

  Nora wonders if they aren’t so different from Ulysses. She had attempted to read it before her first Bloomsday party. “How do people get through this thing?” she asked Stephen. “They don’t,” he replied. “That’s its claim to fame.”

  After all this time, she still feels held at arm’s length by this family. And maybe that’s how they wanted it. They didn’t want to be relatable. Their life at Delancey was a spectacle, even their possessions out on display.

  “It’s good, you know?” Leo says, interrupting her thoughts.

  They turn his way.

  “It’s good that the timing was terrible, even if it means we didn’t have time to plan. Even if we don’t get to mourn the right way. Because it means she didn’t suffer.”

  Nora tucks her jacket around her, wishing she’d brought her heavier coat.

  “Well, that’s exactly right,” June says.

  Nora can feel them look studiously away from her. Look at the alternative, they would have said if she weren’t there. Think of Nora’s mom, all those years.

  “We should go,” Stephen observes. “We don’t want to be late for the party.”

  June nods emphatically, oblivious to his tone.

  She knows that Leo is trying to defend Michael from Stephen. “Think of the upside,” she can hear him say. And it is true, that Grandma Portman didn’t suffer. But to not suffer is its own form of suffering. Grandma Portman might have preferred illness if given the choice, if she’d been handed a form. “Sudden death?” Her pencil would have hovered next to the box. No, she would have thought, leaving it unchecked. Because then you don’t get to say good-bye.

  Leo doesn’t see such dark choices. “Why on earth would someone choose illness?” he would ask, bewildered. But Nora imagines that her mom, in her own way, knew that those seven years had prepared Nora, had taken an edge off the shock. Neither of them had the heart to say it at the time, those last few weeks, her mom back in the hospital for good. But Nora had felt it, a strange, terrible gratitude that this wasn’t her first time there. That they had rehearsed this moment before.

  She and her mom, for better or worse, were pros.

  The view from where Leo stands, high up, is of the big picture. Leo sees two roads: the helpful one that leads to the future; the other, meandering, that draws you away. Leo surveys, shrugs. How easy it must seem to him.

  Death pulls you down into the dirt, she wants to tell him. Suddenly there is no road, no future. There is no magnanimous view, no such thing as a good death. There is only the current hunger, which does not go away. The hunger for something that will never be again.

  Stephen, in the backseat, exudes dismay. “Sit with me,” he urged before the others had joined them. She was happy to have at least convinced him to accept the ride.

  “And leave Leo up front? Like a cabbie?”

  “He’s got his headset. You know he has work calls he’s dying to make.”

  He’ll make them anyway, she thought.

  “We haven’t talked in ages,” Stephen continued.

  “God, it’s true.” They looked at one another. How had it happened, this gap between them? Was it her fault?

  You’ve been skipping brunch, she should have said, poking him. You and your hermit ways.

  But that isn’t fair. She, too, has gone underground. In sight, but absent. Present, but missing. There for all the brunches and dinners. By Leo’s side when he drags her out to bars with friends. But she is elsewhere in her thoughts, barely registering the conversations. Certainly not taking the time to talk with her friend—to ask how he has been and then listen, the way a friend should. I don’t know how it happened, she thinks as they depart the synagogue. This whole time? I don’t really know where I’ve been.

  Eight

  Fishtown, Fishtown. Leo sniffs the air and gets a hit of dried salt. Plumes of smoke billow out from the yellow stacks along the river, a chemical miasma mixing with the breeze, the air reeking of smoked fish. It isn’t unpleasant, exactly, but it’s not for the faint of heart.

  Leo parked two blocks from the warehouse. They made good time returning to the city, but the drive and the wooden pews had done a number on him, his glutes numb. He wishes someone could help him with one of those hamstring stretches they do in baseball, the trainer pushing the player’s leg back, back, the knee coming to meet the nose. It is somehow this, of all things, that Leo most envies of athletes, that their bodies are not their own. He thinks of the number of ACL tears and sprains he has followed as a fan, tracking surgeries and injury reports. McNabb’s broken ankle had been a heartbreaker. Could have won it that year, gotten a ring.

  Still, now they have Owens, and that is something. “TO’s a total drama queen,” Dave told him, shaking his head. “Wide receivers always are,” Leo said. But McNabb needs someone out there, deserves someone out there. “A quarterback is only as good as his receivers,” he added.

  City of brotherly love, maybe, but not of sympathetic fans.

  “So you think we’re going to take it this year?” Dave asked.

  “I do,” Leo affirmed.

  The guys around the break room guffawed, and only then did Leo get the joke. Apparently they asked him this every year, his answer unchanging—a hopeful groundhog predicting nothing but spring. He grinned at them, cracking open a can of Coke, but felt a stir of annoyance. Maybe if they didn’t heckle the guy, he’d have better luck.

  Leo had managed to convince his dad to get season tickets this year, reminding him that they were a good networking tool. “I suppose that’s true,” his dad conceded. The Linc is brand spanking new, a jewel after the dumpy old Vet. Realistically, he’ll probably only be able to coax his dad out for a couple of games, but maybe they can wrangle Stephen out, too, make a guys’ night of it. Leo will chat them up, having perfected the art of carrying on a conversation with his eyes trained on the field. This isn’t so bad, they’ll think, settling into their seats beside him, the Sunday-afternoon air crisp. McNabb will connect with TO down the field and the crowd will roar. Stephen and his dad will stand, caught up in the moment, and Leo will try to hide his smug triumph.

  He crosses Poplar down to the waterfront. The water bobs, murky and gray. It looks better from a distance, mysterious rather than dirty, the Ben Franklin Bridge arcing blue across it. The bridge is rusty, its paint flaking, but the views from the pedestrian path—where he’s been trying, for some time now, to take Nora—are glorious. You just have to look past the cars, the green and white signs, past the visual noise to the view beyond. “Trust me,” he needs to tell Nora, holding out his hand, because if he can get her out to the middle of that bridge, she will turn and see: the spectacular skyline, the puffed-up sailboats by Camden, the river curving with its great sweep.

  He jogs up the steps to Helen’s entrance. The sign for PinPoint Press has circles cut out over the i’s, holes instead of dots. Leo glimpses brick, trees, sky, the contents of the cutouts changing with the angle as he ascends. He has been to the warehouse a couple of times before, accompanying his dad to help him lug boxes home. The holes in the sign always come as a surprise.

  They were a reference to some art school project, apparently, for which Helen had punctured hundreds of holes in paper. “The illusion of ink,” she explained. “It’s a play on perspective.” His dad had fawned over the prints on the studio’s back wall, but the whole thing confused Leo. Did it mean she didn’t like ink? Would she rather be doing her art? “It’s all part of her art,” Nora told him, “the same way I do jazz and gospel.” Yeah, but I don’t really get that, either, he wanted to repl
y. If you train for the one thing, why change?

  Artsy types never make sense to Leo. Lack of logic seems to be a prerequisite. A shadow crosses Nora’s face when anyone asks her about opera. She’d been so good, a star. And though he is relieved to not have her touring, he wonders sometimes why she gave it up so abruptly.

  An antique bell announces his arrival as he pushes open the front door. Helen’s studio has the feel of a bungalow, the tall windows open, light flooding the room with its butter-yellow walls.

  Helen’s back is to him, in cargo shorts and a wifebeater, a blue apron tied around her neck. A delicate network of vines climbs up the back of one leg in an elaborate tattoo, the ink sharp against her skin. Leo watches the lines branch across the back of her thigh.

  “Be right with you!” she calls over her shoulder in her Texan drawl.

  “No problem,” he shouts back.

  She is operating a machine with a vise, safety goggles over her eyes, her hair tied up off her neck. She reminds him of Rosie the Riveter, her biceps taut. He wonders where the tattoo ends, how high it ventures up that expanse of tan, and is delighted by the image that comes to him, unbidden, of her shrugging out of her shorts so that he might see.

  “Can I help you?” she asks, turning. She lifts the goggles so they perch on her head.

  “Leopold,” he reminds her, smiling to show that he doesn’t mind.

  “Oh! Right. Michael’s son.”

  Her face brightens as she says this. Leo wonders if she has a crush on his dad. Most girls do. That mix of confidence and warmth pulls them in.

  “Sorry,” she adds, wiping the sweat from her face with her arm. “I saw the suit before I saw you. Some exec from Comcast is stopping by for a project. Is Michael here?”

  She peers past Leo, as though his dad might spring out and surprise her. Leo wonders if she put on the shorts with his dad in mind. If she thought of him while shaving her legs in the shower that morning, the razor gliding smoothly over the tangle of vines, her foot perched on the tub’s edge.

  “He couldn’t make it.” Leo pauses, wondering if he should say more. May as well get her sympathy. “My grandmother died, actually. Funeral was this morning.”

  “Oh!” Helen’s hand flies up to her mouth. “His side?”

  Leo nods. “She was getting up there, though.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She shakes her head.

  His dad had taken him aside after the funeral. “I’m supposed to pick up the banner for the party. Any chance you could get it?” Leo liked the way his dad leaned in against the driver’s-side window and added, “Don’t tell Mom. She thinks I already have it.” Leo relished the conspiratorial moment that passed between them.

  “I’ve got your stuff in the back,” Helen says, leading the way to the rear of the room.

  His dad was probably wiped from the funeral. He’d probably gone upstairs to take a nap. But Leo appreciates that none of this was said, that there is no extraneous information between men. There was just the question, simple and straight: Can you go?

  Guys never apologize for things that aren’t their fault. They do not simper, elaborate, stew. Is that all right with you, Leo? Is that okay? Do you think me awful, horrible, do you secretly mind? If he couldn’t make it to the printer, his dad wouldn’t have given it a second thought. He wouldn’t have stared at Leo resentfully and said, “Well, what is it that you have to do, exactly?”

  “So what’s the Comcast project?” Leo asks.

  “Oh, that.” Helen reaches for a cardboard tube, unflasking it. “Nothing big, just a gift for some VP who’s retiring. Nice little handmade book with notes from colleagues. A bitch to compile with the deadline they gave me, but they’re a good client.”

  Leo is impressed. This letterpress thing might be an art, but it is a business, too—managing customers, generating accounts. Deciding, for example, to not offer delivery, to make people come to her—a ridiculous practice, some would say, but the perk was that you got to see Helen bent over the letterpress. No wonder his dad loves it here.

  She unfurls a long, white banner printed with green text. “Yes I said yes I will Yes,” it says in bold lettering, O n e h u n d r e d y e a r s o f J o y c e centered beneath in smaller font, spaced evenly along the bottom edge.

  “Michael said not to do too deep of an impression, so I kept it light. And the ink is an exact match to the sample y’all gave. The cocktail napkin? Took me ages to mix it, get it just right. Kind of a cool grass green, not too much yellow. Might make it a permanent addition.”

  “Hmn,” Leo says, nodding, though he comprehends none of what she just said. She indicates a sign on the wall listing available ink colors. Leave it to his mom to insist on something custom. “Portman Green,” he ventures.

  She smiles. “I checked the proof about a dozen times. That last capitalization on the yes looked so strange! Anyway . . .” She takes a step back so that he can evaluate the thing, and Leo scratches his ear, at a loss for what to say. He should have asked his dad if there was anything he was supposed to do.

  “Terrific,” he says after a beat, pretending to examine it.

  “Michael approved the proof, but I always like to do a final check.” She rolls the banner back up.

  Leo feels reluctant for their transaction to end. “So, you do a lot of corporate work?”

  “Oh, you know. Invites, events. Companies like letterpress printing when they want to look classy. It’s nice when they become repeat customers.”

  Leo nods, thinking that must be the trick, to become a company’s go-to. “Stick in an extra card,” he says suddenly. “I’ll pass it along at work.” He wonders whom they use for the holiday party. Someone in Admin handles events (Martha? Michelle?), a mousy type with stringy hair and a big nose. His dad will like that Leo helped Helen.

  “Thanks,” she says, surprised. “Appreciate that.”

  She is trying to remember what he does, and he lets her. He attempted a soft pitch on her once. “What kind of software do you use?” he had asked. “Software?” she repeated, laughing. “You mean like a website?”

  No, not like a website, he had wanted to reply, but this is why he isn’t in sales. “We offer business solutions to help companies grow,” he explained. “Strategy, infrastructure, day-to-day operations. We streamline processes.” He kept the jargon out of it, not wanting to scare her with techno-talk. She is a small fish at any rate, probably not worth the trouble, but he liked the idea of introducing her to a more efficient way of doing things, even if she managed, relying on word of mouth, men in bars mentioning the girl with the racy tattoo and the Southern drawl. You should check her out, they would say, cracking open peanuts and casting off the shells.

  Helen had no team, no tangled organizational chart, probably just a freebie cell phone and a Mac, one of those clamshells in Blueberry or Tangerine from her days in art school, sure to crash any day now, taking her Excel spreadsheet (not backed up, naturally) with it. She didn’t know that she could build a platform—not a website, Helen, but a platform—that would allow her to track projects, vendors. Allow her to showcase her work, manage information, anticipate needs. “I could connect you with every letterpress company in the country,” he’d said. How much time might she save if she could send a quick message over the waves: “Anyone have a recipe for grass-green ink?”

  All of her laborious tasks could be coded, performed at the touch of a button. Clients could see her portfolio from the comfort of their offices, no need to constantly venture to this crumbling old warehouse with its diluvial smell of river. No need for her to pause in her work, clearing off her counter to show them samples. Orders could sit in databases, linked to her phone, her email, her website, so that when she needed more of that custom ink, good Lord, you could press a button rather than reinvent the wheel.

  “What we really do is help companies operate more smoothly,” he exp
lained, wanting to show her that her life could be easier, better. “Trust me,” he should have said, holding out his hand, his card.

  But of course he had done no such thing. He had let her nod, brow furrowed, squinting at the glimpse of the future he offered. “Maybe one day,” she said wistfully. But someone else would beat her to it; another letterpress company was probably at it. A team, a man and a woman hunched over a computer. Helen would hear of them soon enough; they would be featured in a glossy magazine. “Must’ve gotten lucky, known the right folks,” she would say to herself, admiring their website. But to know the right folks, Helen, you have to be able to reach them.

  “Well, please tell Michael I’m thinking of y’all.” She tucks her hair behind her ear. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  Leo nods and thanks her. He catches another glimpse of the vines as she turns, a flash of thigh. He pictures her on the wide counter, the metal letters pressing into her back, upside-down a’s, backward e’s, crooked letters imprinting into her skin: b d q z o o o, the list of inks above them trumpeting vermilion, cadmium, umber, sap.

  He carries the long tube out the door. His phone blinks 1:39. There is just enough time for him to grab a bite.

  He had deposited Nora back at the loft so she could get ready in her painstaking way, wiping the canvas clean only to bring out her makeup brushes again. “You sure you don’t want to get ready at Delancey?” he’d asked that morning. “Ugh, I’d have to pack everything,” she replied, making a face, as though contemplating moving mountains. It was a classic Nora moment, the idea of slipping her dress into a garment bag too much for her. He had half a mind to pack everything for her. And at one time she would have appreciated it. “Wow,” she would have said, surveying the black bag lying flat across the backseat. He would have remembered her makeup, even her hairpins, and she would have been touched by his thoughtfulness. They’d been happy. Happier then. Mainly because she had leaned on him more. If you push a guy out, where does that leave him?