Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (13 page)

“That has dairy. Sherbet has dairy.” William is close to panic. He is kneeling on the cushion of his scrolled metal seat, his elbows on the fancy Victorian table, his hands spread out on the sticky menu. We waited almost an hour in the cold for this table and William is desperate. He spent that hour discussing the relative merits of dairy-free frozen hot chocolate and dairy-free ice-cream sundaes while I did my yoga breathing and tried not to stare at the families in line with us. I was tremendously relieved when the hostess's announcement that strollers were not allowed into the restaurant caused the family in line behind us to take their four-month-old baby girl in her jogger and roll away to more hospitable climes. Everything about that child felt too close to Isabel; I could not bear her proximity. I am sure William noticed neither the announcement nor my relief; he was consumed by a highly audible debate with himself over whether his failure to move his bowels that day was too likely an indication of constipation to risk the consumption of the bananas in a banana split.

“I guess I'll have sorbet,” William says, close to tears. “Do you have sorbet?”

“He'll have a frozen hot chocolate,” I say. “And a banana split. Extra nuts.”

“I can't, Emilia. I'm lactose intolerant. I could get very ill.” His face is pale and drawn. He looks very ill right now.

Now is the time to tell him that he is
not
lactose intolerant, that he once ate a huge piece of ricotta cake just fine, that his grandmother, Jack's mother, routinely fills the phyllo pie she feeds him with Muenster and Gruyère and then lies and says it's soy cheese. She doesn't buy this milk allergy any more than I do. But I'm not brave. Instead I say, “Serendipity has Lactaid. You know, that medicine you take for lactose intolerance? They sprinkle it on their frozen hot chocolate. And on their sundaes.” I turn to the waitress, a middle-aged woman in a frilled apron. “Don't you have Lactaid powder? I know it costs extra, but I don't mind. I'm willing to spend the money.”

The waitress shakes her head uncertainly and I smile at her, willing her to go along with this, to accept my dubious authority, to help me trick this boy into risking an imaginary stomachache for the sake of an hour of bliss. Because whatever William thinks, I am certain that the pleasures of hot fudge, ice cream, whipped cream, and butterscotch outweigh the unlikely perils of his fictional ailments.

“My mother is not convinced that Lactaid works very well,” William says.

“Trust me,” I say.

The impossibility of this request weighs very heavily on his narrow little shoulders.

“What kind of ice cream?” the waitress asks.

“William?”

“Um, chocolate?” he says.

“You get three flavors.” She taps her pad with an impatient pencil.

“Chocolate, chocolate chip, and cookie dough,” I say. “How does that sound?”

William nods.

I say to the waitress, “Please instruct the chef to grind up the Lactaid extra fine, so the ice cream doesn't taste gritty.”

“Right,” she says. “And for you?”

“I'll have a hot fudge sundae with chocolate chip mint. And a café latte. Low-fat milk.”

After the waitress leaves William says, “Why do you bother to put low-fat milk in your coffee, if you're going to have ice cream and whipped cream?”

William eats all of his frozen hot chocolate and almost all the banana split. He licks both the bowl and the back of his spoon, uses his fingers to scrape fudge from the pleats of the glass dish, and sucks melted ice cream through his straw with the force of a Hepavac. He bends so low over the tall, fluted glass that he fogs it with the breath from his nose. I realize that this is the first time I have ever spent so long in William's company without hearing him speak. An hour with William is generally akin to sitting through a college lecture from a very short professor. Now, other than the nasal whistle of his breath, the slurping of liquid through the straw, and the lapping of his tongue against the long metal spoon, William is absolutely quiet. I have, for the first time, a sense of well-being in his presence. I eat my sundae and drink my coffee and watch him drip fudge and caramel onto his orange pique shirt. In the end, his concern for his bowels wins out over his gluttony and he leaves the bananas sitting in a pool of melted ice cream in the bottom of the crescent-shaped bowl. He graciously offers them to me, but I decline, equally graciously.

When he is finished, when his cheeks are slick with cream and sauces of various hues and his belly sticks out like a small, round drum, we leave. As we stand on the corner, waiting for a cab, William slips his hand into mine. My palm goes stiff and my fingers tremble. I realize that I have pulled mittens onto his hands, I have scrubbed them clean, I have put Band-Aids on them, but I have never held them. I grip his small, soft fingers firmly in my own.

“That was excellent,” William says.

“That was another secret,” I say. “Like the booster seat.”

He looks up and gives me a sly wink. “Deal.”

Chapter 14
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

T
he next
morning, as soon as Jack arrives home from the airport, we are back in a cab on the way to Allison's for my niece's birthday party. I like my niece and nephew, but I generally avoid spending time in the company of my sister and her family. While Allison's brand of judgment is not as hard to endure as Lucy's—she is more earnest and well meaning—the fact that she lives her ideals with a religious devotion can be tiresome. She is also arrogant, and though Jack reminds me that this is a Greenleaf family trait, I am convinced that Allison's failure to inherit from my father the self-deprecating sense of humor that I cultivate so assiduously makes her more insufferable than I. At least I hope that's true. What is the point of all this self-loathing if not to temper an otherwise repugnant egotism?

William has never been to my sister's house in Carroll Gardens. More astonishing, he makes the unlikely claim never to have even once set foot in the borough of Lundy's restaurant, the Charlotte Russe, and the long-lost, accursed, but still beloved and mourned Dodgers. As we leave Manhattan I tell him that a person who has never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge can hardly claim to be a New Yorker.

“Brooklyn is not really New York,” he says. He is sitting between Jack and me in the backseat of the taxicab, showing absolutely no ill effects from his evening of lactose debauchery. He is in his booster seat, which he allowed himself to be buckled into with nary a protest, to my grateful surprise. He seems to have taken our bargain seriously.

Jack says, “I know about two and a half million people who would take issue with that statement, my man.”

“But when people say, ‘New York,' they mean Manhattan. If they mean Brooklyn, then they have to say, ‘Brooklyn.' Also Queens, or the Bronx, or Staten Island, or New Jersey.”

“New Jersey is not a borough of New York,” I say.

“I know that, Emilia,” William says. “I am not a stupid baby. I know there are only five boroughs of New York. But sometimes
you
say you're from New York. And you're really from New Jersey. New York means Manhattan. Not Brooklyn. And definitely not New Jersey.”

Jack sputters, swallowing his laughter, and points out the window.

“Look,” he says. “If you look behind you, you can see where the towers used to be.”

“I can't look behind me because of my booster seat,” William says. Then he gives me a knowing glance. “But that's okay, because I am happy to ride in my booster seat. It's very safe. Six and sixty, that's the rule.”

“Sixty,” I say. “You'll probably be in high school by then, but whatever.”

William giggles.

“What are you two laughing about?” Jack sees William and me sharing a joke, the weight that has crushed him for more than two years suddenly takes wing from his back and flutters out the windows of the cab, and he floats two inches above the plastic upholstery.

I lean across William and rub my nose against Jack's face. “It's private,” I say and kiss the rough stubble of his unshaven cheek.

Jack's smile is so wide that the creases in his cheek are hard under my lips.

         

A
llison's kitchen table is crowded with dozens of bagels, glazed pottery bowls of cream cheese, heavy platters of pink lox, plates mounded with flaked whitefish. There are tomatoes, red onions, and capers. There are multicolored pastas, spreads, and casseroles that I don't recognize, that I expect were provided by various of the dark-skinned families milling around the living room. Allison's stable of friends is always meticulously assorted and multihued.

She exchanges our coats for plates and pushes us in the direction of the buffet. “You must try the coconut rice with chicken,” she says. “Marybeth Babalalu made it and it's just delicious.” Allison points to a sallow-faced white woman wearing a calf-length wrap of black, green, and yellow kente cloth with a pattern of diamonds and arrows. Another piece of kente cloth is wrapped around her hair. It leans, a precariously tall tower, slightly off-kilter at the crown of her head. Her husband, who has purple-black skin and a small pink scar under one eye that is the precise hue of his plump lower lip, is wearing pressed Chinos and a white button-down shirt.

“William, you're gigantic!” Allison says. “Get some food and then go downstairs to the basement. Emma is down there with all the other kids.”

Allison's daughter, Emma, is nine years old. She is in the third grade at the Carroll School. It is, of course, a public school, PS 58. Lennon, Allison's son, is graduating this year from Stuyvesant High. My sister agonized for some time about Lennon's decision to apply to a magnet high school. Allison is an opponent of tracking; she believes it stigmatizes those not blessed with a certain, easily quantifiable intelligence, that it unfairly benefits the middle and upper classes. Lennon, however, wanted very much to commute with his circle of friends across the river, and his scores on the admissions test were among the highest in the city. His father, not usually given to interfering with the decisions of the not-yet-but-sure-to-be-appointed-any-day-now Judge Greenleaf, took the boy's side. Allison will not face the same crisis with Emma. Poor Emma is learning delayed, and struggles with even the simplest of school assignments. At Passover last year, after the third glass of wine, and in a rare moment of maternal insecurity, even despair, Allison told me that she worries that the girl will never learn to read, that her disabilities will prove to be permanent, that she might never be able to function in even the most basic of academic environments.

My sister has clearly determined to do battle with her fear. She is the room parent of Emma's classroom, and most of the adults at this birthday party are, like Marybeth and Olatunji Babalalu, the parents of Emma's classmates. Lucy is not here. Her youngest has a hockey game in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, this weekend, and she has gone along as a chaperone. Allison tells me that Lucy has high hopes for the hockey coach, the divorced father of two of the boys on the team. Over the years since her divorce Lucy has worked her way through two soccer coaches, an SAT tutor, and an earth sciences teacher.

William does not want to go downstairs with the rest of the kids. He stands next to Jack and me eating pita triangles and peculiarly bright-colored humus while Jack makes small talk with Allison's husband, Ben. I like Ben, although he reminds me of an egg. He is round and bald, and his skin is smooth and speckled. He has an egglike personality, too. It is hard to latch on to Ben, hard to feel close to him or to figure out whether what you are saying is having any effect on him. Allison says that his clients, particularly the young African American men, adore him, that they find him to be a kindred spirit. While it is hard for me to believe that a sixteen-year-old black kid whose wrinkled, baggy pants are slung so low that they hobble him could possibly have much in common with Ben, I am willing to give my brother-in-law the benefit of the doubt.

“How's work?” Ben asks Jack.

“Fine,” Jack says. He never discusses his work with my sister and her husband. This is not because he is ashamed of being a commercial litigator. Jack does not accept Allison's view of him as a tool of the corporate establishment. I should not criticize my sister. As I have said, she personifies her principles. She has been a public-interest lawyer, representing only the indigent, ever since she graduated from law school. Before that she spent a year with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, digging wells. Allison's family eats organic food, some of which they grow in their garden; her thermostat is set to sixty-two degrees; and she does not drive a car. I cannot quibble with the way my sister lives her life, but her look of disdain when Jack first described his work made me want to slam her face into a platter of cold noodles with sesame sauce. My father had invited Lucy, Allison, and Ben out for Chinese food to meet the man I was moving in with, the man I had told my father I intended to marry as soon as his divorce became final. While I think Jack expected a certain amount of suspicion from my family, he had probably assumed it would be because of the age difference, or because he was married when we met. He did not imagine that it would be because my sister views any attorney who does not devote his or her life to battling on behalf of the underprivileged, myself and my father included, as having sold his or her soul to the devil. I should have warned him, but I was so enraptured that it had never occurred to me that anyone else would think Jack was anything other than perfect.

Allison greeted Jack's description of his latest case, an acquisition soured into a lawsuit, with a sneer and a sharp exhalation of disgust.

I said, “Why is it that the only people who find the earning of money to be morally reprehensible are the ones who grew up with plenty of it?”

“Em, hush,” Jack said.

“No, honey, it's okay,” I said. “Allison, you are so fucking sanctimonious. Well, guess what? Jack didn't have a childhood like ours. He didn't grow up in a nice big house in New Jersey. He didn't have horseback riding lessons.” For a brief period, when she was about twelve, Allison had wanted to be a jockey. “Jack grew up in Yonkers, in a three-family house that his father lost to the IRS when Jack was in his sophomore year of high school. He went to SUNY New Paltz, because that's where he could go to college for free, and he got a full ride to Columbia Law School. He has about two hundred Syrian cousins he sends money to, he bought both his mother and his sister houses in Boston, and he pays more child support than any other divorced father in the city of New York. So give him a break, Allison. Just give him a fucking break.”

Jack stared at his plate, combing his chopsticks through his pile of rice.

“The work we do is an expression of the world we want,” Allison said.

“Girls, enough,” my father said. He was sitting across the table from me, and over the top of the lazy Susan heaped with soy sauce, mustard bottles, and brimming platters of food, I could see his hands outstretched beseechingly. “This is a family dinner, not a political debate.”

“Everything is a political debate with Allison,” I said. “And if you dare say ‘the personal is political,'” I said to her, “I will reach across this table and dump the kung pao shrimp down the neck of your shirt.”

Everyone laughed, pretending that I had made a joke, and for the rest of the meal we acted as if nothing had happened, as if I had not just humiliated my boyfriend by trotting out his working-class credentials like a badge of honor, a trump card in the never-ending game of Greenleaf family one-upmanship. Jack doesn't talk about his work with any of them now, except my father, and only when the others are not there.

Jack says, “How about you, Ben? Any good cases, lately?”

“Rape case. You probably read about it in the paper. The victim allegedly had her finger cut off.”

“William, it's time to go downstairs and play with the other kids,” Allison calls out from across the room. “The upstairs is grown-ups only now.” Allison has magical powers; she can overhear with particular detail and accuracy any conversation that happens within the walls of her house. It must be very frustrating to be her child.

“I don't want to go downstairs,” William says.

“Go on, Will,” Jack says. “The kids are all down there. You'll have fun.”

Lennon picks his way across the room, clearly sent over by his mother.

“Hey, William,” he says. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes,” William says. “Lennon, like John Lennon.”

“Right on, man. You're an awfully little dude to know about John Lennon.”

“My father takes me to Strawberry Fields sometimes.”

“That's cool!”

“I don't like the Beatles.”

“Maybe you haven't listened to the right songs. Has anyone ever played you ‘Imagine'?” Lennon winks at me. He is trying very hard, this good-natured boy. “It's awesome.” Lennon sings, “
Imagine all the people, living for today
. . .” in a surprisingly pretty voice.

William says, “‘Imagine' is not a Beatles song. John Lennon wrote it all by himself.”

“Go downstairs with Lennon,” I say. “If you don't have fun, you can come back up.”

William closes his eyes, clamps his lips in a thin line, and then nods. He follows Lennon through the arched doorway and we watch their retreating backs. They are separated by a mere twelve years, these two, and yet they could be different species. Lennon is huge, six foot three or four, and if his father is an egg, then he is the hatchling, all knobby knees and splayed paddles for feet, his feather-soft hair defying its armor of bright blue gel, his arms like long wings, flapping at his sides as if he is so surprised by their size that he cannot control their jerking movements. While Lennon, who is so much older, still seems unformed, slightly blurred around the edges by growth and change, there is a rigid, finished quality about William's tiny form, as if this is the size he has always been, the way he has always looked, and the way he intends to remain for the rest of his life.