Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (17 page)

He inhales raggedly.

“Don't you want to tell me something about Belvedere Castle? Like who built it or when?”

I try something else. “Did you know that there is a pair of red-tailed hawks that live right near you? Their names are Pale Male and Lola and they nest on a ledge of an apartment building on Fifth Avenue.”

He kicks his toe against the wall, evincing no interest in these birds and their extravagant taste in real estate. He is either too upset or does not care about raptors that are not extinct.

“William, it's not the end of the world. Ethical Culture is a really great school. I know lots of people who went to Ethical Culture and loved it.”

“Collegiate is the best school.”

“No, it's not. Collegiate is snooty. And it's for boys. Who would want to go to an all-boy school?”

“If you go to Collegiate, you can go to Harvard.”

“First of all, not everyone from Collegiate goes to Harvard. In fact, the vast majority of Collegiate kids don't go to Harvard. I happen to have met plenty of Collegiate graduates who are so stupid they would be lucky to get into Bergen Community College.” I don't mention that I've actually slept with a few of these. “Second of all, there are plenty of kids from Ethical Culture who go to Harvard. Third of all, you are five years old. Why the hell do you care about going to Harvard?”

“You went to Harvard.”

“Yeah, and look at me now.”

William takes this rejoinder a little more seriously than I would like.

“William, your dad went to SUNY. And he's doing great. It just doesn't make that much of a difference where you go to college. And it certainly doesn't make any difference where you go to kindergarten. All that matters is that you like school. And you love school. You
love
it. You are the king of the number pegs. Sharlene says so.”

“You don't understand.”

“Yeah, I do. You're bummed out because you had your heart set on wearing one of those dopey little Collegiate beanies. But you'll get over it, I promise. And so will your mom.”

“They don't wear beanies. They wear jackets and ties.”

“Well that's even worse. Can you imagine? Wearing a tie every day? Gross.”

“I like ties.”

I rest my binoculars on the stone castle wall and crouch down until I am at his eye level. He is staring at his binoculars, fiddling with the cord and trying hard not to cry. “Dude,” I say. “It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.”

His whisper is hoarse and creaky. “My mom is mad at me.”

I am about to reassure him that she isn't, but this child is not stupid. He knows anger when he sees it. Carolyn is furious, and he feels her rage spilling over onto him.

“When grown-ups want something, and they don't get it, sometimes they sort of freak out,” I say. “They get mad at everything and everybody. Your mom is mostly mad at Collegiate. And she's mad at your dad. I think it only
feels
like she's mad at you because she's so mad at everybody else.”

William still does not look at me. I put one awkward arm around him and pull him close. For a moment he sags against me, resting his head on my shoulder. Then, suddenly, as if realizing what he has done, he pulls away.

“You don't understand,” he says. “You don't understand about Collegiate because you're not sophisticated. You're from New Jersey, and you're not sophisticated, like me and my mom are.”

I get to my feet and grab him around the waist. I hoist him up and turn to the chest-high stone wall. Far below us is the rocky outcropping on which the castle is built.

“Look through your binoculars, William.”

He kicks his heels against my legs, panicking. “Don't drop me!”

“I'm not going to drop you. Just sit up here and look through your binoculars.” I balance him on the wall, holding him tightly around his waist.

He lifts his binoculars to his eyes.

“Can you see?” I ask. I show him how to focus on the vast expanse of park stretching before us. “Now look at those buildings. That's the Upper West Side. That's where we live, and that's where Collegiate is.”

“It's on Seventy-eighth and Broadway,” he says.

“Right. Look on the other side.” I move his binoculars to the east. “That's the Upper East Side. That's where you and your mom live.” I point him north now. “Now see how far north you can see? If it weren't such a crappy day maybe you'd be able to see all the way to Riverdale.”

He turns the focus dial intently, beginning to enjoy it now, despite himself.

“It's a really big city, William. It's a huge city, and Collegiate is one tiny, little dot. It's a tiny, little, meaningless dot. It's a huge city, and you're going to have a huge life, and I promise you, I
promise
you, Collegiate means nothing. No matter what happens, no matter how mad and sad anybody gets, you've just got to remember how big everything is, and how far you can see. Okay?”

He sweeps his binoculars back and forth, but does not reply.

“Okay?” I repeat.

“I can't see anything,” he says.

I drop him to the ground, take his binoculars, and head down the winding stairs. William clomps along behind me, his expensive French lace-up boots scraping against the stone steps. As I am returning the binoculars to the desk, I glance at the wall of notices. Weekly naturalists' tours of the park will resume on April 1, volunteers are being sought for next year's migratory waterfowl count, and there will be a special Walk to Remember on the last night of February. Those interested are encouraged to sign up online or by phone. Why require a sign-up, I wonder? So that the organizers can verify the sincerity of claims of loss? Do they check hospital records, death certificates? Or perhaps they are maintaining some highly particularized mailing list to sell at inflated prices to specialized businesses: the manufacturers of two-ply superabsorbent facial tissue, of waterproof mascara, of miniature funeral urns.

“I know all about the hawks,” William says. He has come up behind me. “Pale Male lives at 927 Fifth Avenue, at Seventy-fourth Street. In Central Park there are sharp-shinned hawks and broad-tailed hawks and ospreys and kestrels and falcons. I know all about them, Emilia.”

“Good for you, William. Come on, let's go home.”

Chapter 18
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

W
hen
Jack walks into the apartment he is carrying two grocery bags and William and I have been waiting for him for almost an hour. William rushes his father, pinning him against the still-open front door. Jack sets the bags down and kneels. “I am so proud of you,” he says, whereupon William bursts into tears. Jack ignores him. “Ethical Culture is a great place.”

“I didn't get into Collegiate,” William wails.

“Sweetheart, Will-man, it doesn't matter. You are going to have a terrific time at Ethical Culture. You'll make lots of friends. You'll love it. And now I don't want to hear any more about this school stuff, okay? It's just not that important, Will. You're going to a great school, and that's it.”

Jack stands up and lifts Will in one arm. He tries to pick up the grocery bags with his other hand but I take them away from him.

“What's all this?” I say.

“I didn't feel like eating takeout,” he says. “I'm going to make kibbe.” He walks into the kitchen and lowers William into a chair. “Will, you want to help me make kibbe just like Grandma makes?”

“You're going to make kibbe?” I say, following him with the grocery bags.

“Sure.”

“Since when do you know how to make kibbe?”

“I've seen my mother make it about a thousand times. I should be able to figure it out.” Jack starts unloading the grocery bags. He puts a lump of meat in butcher paper on the table, a bag of pine nuts, a tall bottle of olive oil. I pick up the olive oil. It is organic, from California, and cost $32.

I say, “Watching someone cook and cooking yourself are two very different things.”

“You watched my mother make it exactly once before you made it yourself,” Jack says.

“I know how to cook. You don't.”

“I know how to cook.”

“Scrambled eggs is not cooking. Pasta with store-bought pesto is not cooking.”

Jack whips the tabletop with a bundle of parsley, scattering tiny sprigs of green. William looks up, his eyes wide. “Goddamn it, Emilia,” Jack says. “I don't feel like choking down another meal of miserable Chinese takeout. I don't want Thai food or salad from the deli. I'm making kibbe, if I have to spend three hours on the goddamn phone with my goddamn mother having her talk me through the whole goddamn recipe.”

“I'll make it,” I say. I unwrap the package of meat and dump it into a bowl. I dip my fingers into the cold softness of the ground lamb and squeeze a fistful. It spurts between my knuckles and only then do I remember that I have forgotten to wash my hands.

“I'm sorry,” Jack says.

“No, I'm sorry,” I say.

“You forgot to wash your hands,” says William.

While I chop onions, I think about Jack's mother, Tmima. Before Isabel was born she was pleasant to me, but formal, even stiff. At our wedding she had worn a face so long, so drooped with mourning, that my grandmother had gone to comfort her, assuming that, like herself, the ceremony had made Tmima long for her dead husband, miss her own days as a young bride. Tmima had shaken her head and said to my grandmother, “Where I come from, we do not divorce.”

My grandmother could not believe that what my mother-in-law was grieving was the loss of the first wife, the shiksa. “But Emilia's
Jewish
!” she had insisted, over and over again.

Tmima shook her weary head and said, “No one. Not ever. The husband, he would take a second wife before he would divorce, like the Arabs. I heard of men who did this, sometimes, outside the city. But now, these children, they divorce without even considering their poor babies.”

“Pah!” my grandmother said, and stomped off. What could you say to a woman who would rather her son had chosen polygamy over a second marriage and joint legal custody?

I did my best to win my mother-in-law over. I watched her carefully while she prepared meals of pickled cauliflower and slow-cooked chicken, and then foolishly served them to her when she visited us, realizing only when it was too late that she resented my intrusion into her culinary realm. When I figured this out, I called and begged her to send a package of the little sugared date cookies Jack loves so much, claiming that no matter how often I tried I could not get them to come out right. In fact, my mahmoul are better than hers. I use butter, not margarine, in the dough, and instead of having a faintly dusty texture, like hers do, mine melt in your mouth. She also puts too many almonds in the filling.

It turns out, however, that all I needed to do to earn my mother-in-law's undying love was to lose my daughter. When Isabel died, Tmima dropped everything. Literally. Jack's sister told me that she dropped her carpet sweeper, walked into her bedroom, packed her suitcase, and took a cab to the airport. When she came into our apartment she walked right by Jack and folded me into her soft, powdery, cinnamon-scented arms. She held me while I cried my wretched and guilty tears and said, “I know, my daughter. I know. Before we left Syria, I watched my little sister die of diphtheria. And before Jack, I had a baby born too soon. I know what it means to lose a child.”

“You lost a baby?” Jack said. “I didn't know that. You never told me that.”

“There's a lot you don't know,” Tmima said. She only went to comfort her son when she was sure I had exhausted my tears.

“I'm happy to make kibbe for you,” I say now. “I'm sorry it's been so long since I cooked.”

“It's okay, sweetie,” Jack says. “It's not like it's your job to cook for me.”

“Emilia doesn't have a job,” William says.

“I'm taking a leave of absence,” I say, frying the onions and the lamb together. Jack has forgotten the pomegranate molasses and the sumac. I doubt he even knows the recipe calls for them. I doubt he even knows that such things exist.

“I'm taking a leave of absence from this kitchen,” William says, cracking himself up. He scrambles down off his chair and runs out of the room, slipping on the wood floor in his socks. I can hear him hooting all the way down the hall.

“Well, today was certainly a drama,” I say.

“She has done such a number on him about this school thing,” Jack says. He gets a bottle of wine out of the pantry and pulls two glasses down from the cupboard.

“Your ex-wife is a head case.”

“I'm worried about him. I really am. It's like nothing else matters except getting into Collegiate.”

“Don't worry about William, William is going to be fine,” I say. “Worry about Carolyn. Carolyn is going to be institutionalized. She's going to be carted off to Bellevue. They probably have a special ward for the parents of children who don't get into their first-choice kindergarten.”

Jack hands me my wine and takes a slug of his own. He finishes half the glass, leaving a purple mustache across his upper lip. I sip, rolling the wine on my tongue. I can't stand the taste of alcohol, would never drink except that I like very much the sensation of being drunk. I like erasing my emotions, or at least the memory of them.

“She has a lot riding on this,” Jack says.

I toast pine nuts in a small pan, tossing them over and over so that they brown evenly. Then I pull out my food processor. It is dusty. As I take my apron from the hook where it has hung for months, stiffened into permanent pleats, the string around the neck bent where it pressed against the hook, I say, “What does she have riding on kindergarten? Whether William gets into Harvard? Don't worry about it. He's going to skip college altogether and just head straight to MIT for a postdoc in nuclear physics.”

Jack finishes his glass of wine and pours himself another. He waves the bottle at me but I shake my head. “Carolyn was counting on the sibling preference,” he says. “She's pregnant, and she's worried that the next one won't be as bright as William. She thought William was her ace in the hole, and now she's convinced she'll be trapped at Ethical Culture and then at Fieldston. She's afraid she'll never be able to move over to Collegiate or to one of her other first choices.”

I am reaching for the iron skillet of sizzling lamb and onion and my pot holder drops to the floor as I grab the iron handle. I scream and run to the sink. I hold my throbbing palm under the cold water and cry.

“Jesus Christ,” Jack says, hovering over me. “Do we need to go to the emergency room? Sweetie, how bad is the burn? Let me see.” He pulls my hand out of the water and turns it over, searching for the blistering welt. There is a faint blush of red across my palm. He puts my hand back under the stream. “You'd better hold it under the water,” he says.

“She's pregnant? How can she be pregnant?” I am sobbing. I wipe my nose with the back of the hand that isn't burned, and then wipe the snot on my jeans. “She's not even married! And she's forty-three years old! How can she possibly be pregnant?”

“She's forty-two. And she's been seeing someone since the summer.”

“She has not. William would have told us. He can't keep a secret.” But I know he can. He keeps my secrets just fine.

“William doesn't know about the baby. She's been waiting until she passes the three-month mark to tell him.”

“How pregnant is she? Two months? Two and a half?”

Jack turns off the water and wraps my hand in a towel. “Why do you care about this, Emilia? She's just about three months. She told me that when we lost Isabel it made her realize that she wanted another child. She got pregnant right away.”

I wrench my hand out of his. “She got pregnant because of Isabel? Your ex-wife got pregnant because my baby died?” I am screaming now and my harsh voice reverberates around the kitchen, ringing off the copper-backed pans hanging from their hooks.

“You don't get to be upset about this, Emilia,” Jack shouts back. “If anyone gets to be upset, it's me, and I'm not going to be. I'm just not. I've decided it's a good thing she's pregnant. It's a
nice
thing. Carolyn said she was so touched by our loss, by how much I loved Isabel, by how devastated I was, that it made her realize that she wanted that kind of love in her life again. You should feel good about it.
I
do. I feel good about it.”

“You're lying,” I scream. “You do
not
feel good about it. You're jealous and you're furious, just like I am.”

“No I'm not,” he says. “It comforts me that something good came out of Isabel's death, that she didn't die in vain.”

“That is
not
why Isabel died. Isabel didn't die so that Carolyn could have another baby. Goddamn you, you fucking son a bitch, that is not why she died. That is not a good enough reason!”

I run out of the kitchen, past William who is standing in the hallway, his hands balled up in fists and pressed into his cheeks. I grab my coat, shove my feet into my clogs, and slam out the door. I push the button for the elevator, but it does not come fast enough. I run down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the miserable gray of a February afternoon.