Swimming Across the Hudson (15 page)

Jenny's freshman roommate at U.C. Berkeley had been raped by a stranger in an alley off campus. She'd dropped out of school and gone home to Missouri. As far as Jenny knew, she'd never recovered. “That guy ruined her life,” Jenny told me once.

Still, that was fourteen years before. Lots of criminals ruined their victims' lives; Jenny knew that. She'd heard hundreds of victims testify in court; she'd seen their families hold vigil; she wasn't insensitive to what crime did to them. But if she was always thinking about the victims, she wouldn't have been able to do her job. She could have chosen to be a prosecutor. Or she could have taken the easy route and worked for a law firm, making a good salary and avoiding many hard questions.

“Don't you think he has the right to a good defense?” I asked. Then I felt bad, throwing her argument back at her.

“Rape is different.” On the nightstand was a picture of Jenny holding Tara hours after she was born. Jenny was still in college. I saw that picture every day, but it struck me now, perhaps because Jenny looked so young. One moment you were in college, the next you were a mother, and the next you were defending violent criminals in court. How did that all fit together? Was there a moment when you realized that your decisions had consequences, that other people's lives depended on you?

“Why's it different?”

“It just is. It's something you can't understand.”

“Don't tell me it's a woman's thing.”

“It
is
a woman's thing. Do you understand what it's like to walk alone at night and know you could be raped?”

“Not the way you do, obviously. But I can try to imagine it.”

“That doesn't compare.”

Did she understand what it was like to wonder where you came from, to spend your whole life staring at strangers, thinking, He looks like me, so does she? We could compete over untranslatable experiences, deciding that no one understood anyone else and we should talk only to ourselves. “If rape is a woman's thing,” I said, “then robbery is a property owner's thing and pederasty is a child's thing. Where does that leave empathy?”

“Rape's just different. I can't explain it.”

That might have been the end of the conversation, but when Jenny and I went to visit Jonathan and Sandy, I made the mistake of mentioning Jenny's case. Jonathan asked her if she'd become less high-minded.

“Don't even start,” Jenny said. I didn't know what it was about Jenny and Jonathan. They liked each other. But she could make him defensive, perhaps because she fought the battle he used to
fight, back in college when he was political. “I'm going to defend this guy.”

“So we're back to where we began—you defending absolutely anyone.”

“Come on,” Sandy said. “Leave Jenny alone.”

“Tell me something,” Jenny said to Jonathan, “do you go through your patients' tax records to see if they've cheated? Do you ask them whether they beat their wives or whether they've been arrested?”

“No.”

“That's what I thought. You don't say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Mengele, no stool sample from you,' or, ‘Excuse me, ma'am, but do you love your children—and if you don't, I can't give you a CAT scan.'”

“I took an oath when I graduated from medical school to help heal the sick.”

“I took an oath too.”

“Everyone's entitled to medical care.”

“They're also entitled to legal counsel.”

Jonathan wasn't convinced. After Jenny left to get Tara, he continued the argument with me. “What would Jenny do if Sandy or I got beaten up? It happens all the time—kids with baseball bats kicking the shit out of gays. What if Jenny were hired to defend the guy?”

“That's absurd,” I said. “The odds are so small you'd do better to buy a lottery ticket. Besides, Jenny wouldn't be allowed to take the case. It would be a conflict of interests.”

“I think she does good work,” Sandy said.

Jonathan ignored him. “Don't get me wrong, Ben. I like Jenny. But sometimes it gets to me. You've chosen such a do-gooder girlfriend. It's like you've married Mom.”

“She's not Mom, and I haven't married her. And what's wrong with being a do-gooder? You're a do-gooder yourself. What do you think being a doctor is?”

He didn't answer me. “Why can't you chart a new path for once?”

Chart a new path? I'd met my birth mother. True, she'd contacted me first, but I hadn't refused to meet her, as Jonathan would have done with his. I wasn't afraid of my past. Did he think that because he was gay he was more of a man than I was, that he'd grown up and I hadn't?

When I got home, I found Jenny on our bed with her knees up and her shoes off, thin bands of dirt like zebra stripes along the tops of her feet. She'd changed into a black tank top and a long gingham skirt with a flower print across it. Her hair was tied back. “You look beautiful,” I said.

“Your brother was a prick today.”

“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have brought the subject up.”

“It's not your fault.” She rolled over on her stomach and asked me to give her a massage. I rubbed her back, shoulders, and neck.

“I need a vacation,” she said.

“I do too.”

“We should go somewhere. We haven't taken a vacation together in over a year.”

“Vacations are expensive.”

“I'm not talking about something fancy. Just a chance for us to get away for a while.”

I thought about this the next day at work, and when I came home that night, I told Jenny that I'd take her on a vacation when Tara left for summer camp.

“I didn't mean take me. We can go in on it together.”

“I
want
to take you. You can get a couple of days off work. We'll go down the coast, maybe stay at a bed-and-breakfast.”

 

W
hen I went with Susan to see
Apollo 13
, she'd suggested that she meet Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara. She'd been patient, she said. She also thought it was a good idea for us to spend time together with other people around. As things stood, too much was at stake when we saw each other alone. We were having trouble relaxing.

She may have been right, but it bothered me how she approached our relationship—as something to work on, to construct. Her casualness was willed, which made it not casual.

But now, a month later, with Jenny apprehensive about her work, I thought that getting together with Susan might distract her. Also, my parents were coming to visit the next week, and Susan wanted to meet them too. I wasn't prepared for that to happen. So Susan and I made an agreement. She could meet Jonathan, Jenny, and Tara, but not my parents.

When we met, Susan was wearing a yellow cotton pantsuit that made her look like someone who belonged at a Miami Beach resort. The rest of us were in jeans and sneakers. It was a Sunday. We'd agreed to have brunch at Noah's Bagels on Irving Street, where bicyclists in Lycra shorts stopped in to pick up sandwiches, and teenagers holding skateboards tasted the lox trim with no intention of buying it. Susan looked out of place, and by association, we did as well.

There was a series of handshakes, all of us sticking our arms across one another's bodies, as if we were engaged in some sort of dance, reaching into the circle.

“It's nice to meet you,” Susan told everyone.

We ordered bagel sandwiches from the counter and sat down at a table. The space was too small. We sat huddled, our legs bumping, a profusion of apologies uttered as if we all were strangers.

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” said Susan.

I'd had no expectations for this meal, nothing other than the hope that everyone would get along. Now, however, as we all sat in silence, I thought of myself as a host who had brought together the wrong combination of people. I felt responsible, but more than that. I wanted everyone to like Susan, not, principally, because I liked her, but because I considered her an extension of me.

Jenny said that the weather was good.

Jonathan agreed.

It
was
good, but no better than yesterday and no better, in all likelihood, than it would be tomorrow. It was June in San Francisco; the weather was always good in June. I wished for a hailstorm, something remarkable for us to discuss. Maybe that was why there were so many boring people in California. They always talked about the weather, which hardly ever changed.
It's sunny out. It certainly is
.

Tara had her face low to the table. She was concentrating on her bagel. She seemed oblivious of the rest of us. She could as easily have been eating alone.

“I'm glad to meet you,” Susan said again. She was talking to all three of them.

Jenny smiled and gently nudged Tara, to get her to look up. “We're glad to meet you too,” Jenny said.

Jonathan seemed about to reach out and shake Susan's hand. Had he forgotten we'd done that already? “How do you like San Francisco?” he asked.

“I like it a lot. And you?”

“Me?” Jonathan said.

“Do you like San Francisco?”

“Oh. Yes. But I've lived here for a while.”

Susan took another bite. But no sooner had she done that than she put her bagel down again, seeming to want to speak. It was as if she hadn't yet learned how to coordinate these activities. I pictured her epiglottis, flipping back and forth as she ate and talked, victim of her indecision, trying to keep up with her brain.

“You're Ben's brother.” She appeared simply to be musing, talking to herself as much as to anyone else. Over her shoulder, in a big plastic box attached to the counter, mini-hamantaschen were arranged in piles: prune, apricot, and cherry; they looked like pieces of candy. On the wall opposite the counter were photographs of Noah and of his parents. There were pictures of New Yorkers protesting the Brooklyn Dodgers' move to L.A. and of David Ben-Gurion talking with Albert Einstein. There were handwritten letters from satisfied customers, including one from somebody who had been born in Eastern Europe and grown up in New York City, and who said Noah's bagels compared favorably with any other bagels in the world. I imagined a bagel store in Indiana, golden-haired farm kids smiling pleasantly at you as they tossed frozen Lender's into the microwave.

“You're adopted also,” Susan said to Jonathan. This came out like an announcement.

Jonathan looked amused. “That's right.”

This too provoked silence.

Periodically, Jenny and Jonathan looked at Susan. They were curious about her, glad enough to be here, I could tell—even my brother, who'd pretended that having to come to brunch had been an imposition on him. But they didn't say anything to Susan. I felt like a talk-show host, with the urge to introduce her to the audience.
This is my birth mother, folks—what do you think?

“I'm sorry,” Susan told them. “The last thing I want is to make everyone uncomfortable.”

“It's just an unusual situation,” I said. “I mean, you and me being related, Susan, but not really. And Jonathan and me also being related
but not really, but in the opposite way that you and I are. It's kind of like Jack Sprat.”

Everyone stared at me perplexedly.

“You know,” I said. “Jack Sprat and his wife. One of them ate fat and the other ate lean. But together, they ate everything—they covered all the bases.” I stared at my plate with the confusion of someone who had never seen a bagel before. “Then there's me and Jenny. We're not even related at all.”

Now Susan came to
my
rescue. “I've heard a lot about you,” she told the three of them.

“Like what?” Jonathan asked. Was he pleased to hear this, or did he wish that I hadn't talked about him with someone he considered a stranger? The fact was, I hadn't said much about him or Jenny; my conversations with Susan had focused mostly on us. But I had told her that Jonathan was gay. Was that what she was referring to? I hadn't prepared anyone for what would happen today. I should have done a better job of prompting them.

Susan spoke to Jonathan. “I've actually seen you several times before.”

“You have?”

She told him what she'd told me—that she'd grown up in New Jersey, and that when we were children she used to ride across the bridge and watch the two of us play in Riverside Park.

“You spied on us?” Jonathan glared at me, as if I were implicated in what Susan had done.

“I wasn't spying.” Susan seemed to regret having brought this up. “I just wanted to watch Ben play.”

Susan turned to Jenny. “Ben tells me you're a public defender. And that you've just gotten a rape case.”

“Mom's feeling conflicted about rape,” Tara said. She appeared simply to be mouthing the words, amused to hear the phrase—
Mom's feeling conflicted
—come out, as if she were mimicking something she'd read.