The Sixteenth of June (6 page)

Leo didn't mind. He didn't care, even back then, that the attention was on his brother. He admired him, the way Stephen got those awards: best essay, best science project. Then puberty hit, and frail Stephen began to grow. Girls turned their heads. Guys looked at him grudgingly. Leo was relieved for his brother, suddenly tall and handsome, no longer a target in the halls.

Stephen never seemed to notice him back. Not when Leo made the basketball team (“Aren't you too short for that?” Stephen had asked). Not when he got elected class representative. And certainly not after they moved to Philly, with Stephen halfway out the door to college.

If Leo was the puppy of the family, Stephen was the cat, regal and haughty.

Then the three of them had that summer in Philly, and everything changed.

The funny part was that Leo had by then given up on the idea of being friends with his brother. His freshman year, he'd pledged Pi Kappa Alpha. “You're such a Pike, dude,” they told him. Brotherhood, he realized, could be found in other ways.

These guys appreciated him. They noticed him. They
loved
him. His unwavering normalcy was no longer a weakness, and Leo felt more sure-footed. He might never be a bigwig like his dad, and he wasn't book smart like his brother. He didn't have his mom's looks or care about her frilly world of privilege. But, for the first time, he felt like those things didn't matter.

Going into that summer, Leo was focused on Nora. He was thrilled that she was staying at Delancey, that they'd get to spend more time together. He accepted her close friendship with Stephen. There was no point in objecting to it or acting jealous. That would be, as the Pikes liked to say, a dick move.

So Leo played it cool, tuning them out when they went on about Yale, mentioning shared profs and friends, dorms and events whose names Leo didn't recognize. He smiled and sipped his beer, pretending not to mind.

What he didn't expect was for the three of them to find a dynamic all their own. Philly seemed to open up for them that summer. They ventured to neighborhoods he hadn't known about in high school: the narrow strip of bars on Sansom, the little pockets of Old City. They would meet for happy hour at the Nodding Head or a picnic at Rittenhouse Square, crowding together on a blanket. Leo realized that he and his brother were finally doing that elusive, brotherly thing of hanging out without its being a big deal. Trivia night at the corner bar, karaoke at the place on Chestnut, Nora bringing down the house with a roar. Even a baseball game once, a season opener, Phillies vs. Braves, the three of them sharing a bag of caramel corn.

Leo felt some part of him stir that summer, some missing piece click into place. That summer felt golden and whole. He worked for a software company during the day and came home to Nora at night. They hung out with friends and went to bars. The difference was that Stephen was with them, too. Leo saw a glimmer on the horizon. This was how life could be.

When their exclusionary bubble reared its head, Stephen and Nora laughing at some inside joke, Leo reminded himself that they'd been friends before he entered the scene. They talked like he wasn't there because it was their habit. He shrugged it off and issued a smile.

Just as he did today.

Stephen and Nora liked to play Mr. & Ms. Etiquette, policing his uncouth ways, but they never thought about how they could be inconsiderate, at times rude. Not to a bunch of strangers they would never see again, but to the person closest to them.

Memo
. He feels it coming from across the room.
Do not belch and then blow out your Coke
.

His own parents aren't so particular. His mom, itching to get back to the city, will whisper to his dad at the earliest possible moment. His dad will nod while looking out at the room, a politician getting input from an aide.

His parents wouldn't care if Leo ate sandwich after sandwich. They wouldn't care if he left early to squeeze in some work at the office. Nora fears them too much, convinced that the right combination of outfit and makeup and conversational morsel will produce some effect on them. But maybe that's how girls are, always trying.

His dad is the last person to sweat that stuff. He did the prayer thing because it was how he'd been raised, but it wasn't some display of reverence, the way it is for Stephen. When his dad surveyed the room, it was to check on Sharon, to make sure he had talked with each person there. His dad understands that funerals are a time for family, a time to gather the people around you—not to prove how devout you are.

Follow-up memo to Leopold: phones are to be put away.

He slips his Palm back into his pocket. It makes her less anxious, he figures. So he resists the urge to scroll through his email—a workday, his in-box piling up, a mountain to conquer later. Resists checking for pregame updates. (Malone out with his knee!). A travesty that Game 5 is tonight, tip-off at nine, the heart of the party, with an upset in the air. How could you not root for Detroit? The city of underdogs. He won't be able to sneak up to the TV without his mom tearing him a new one, and his dad isn't a basketball fan. “League of thugs,” he always says when Leo mentions the NBA.

Leo has resisted other things as well. “Nice out here,” he'd wanted to remark that morning as they glided through the suburbs. The trees looked like broccoli. The potholes disappeared, the road smooth beneath them. He wanted to suggest a quick detour to look at houses, imagining which one might someday be theirs. But Nora's face had been set, her eyes distant, and so he had refrained. He let her have her space, just as his dad was letting his mom have the party. Because that is what you do.

It is enough for him, what he has. He gets impatient sometimes, wanting to run out into their future, because he can see it waiting—the house, the lawn, the tricycle resting on the drive. They aren't ready yet, he knows. The hiccup of the past few years—well, who could have seen that coming?

And so he must be patient, bide his time. Try not to let those thoughts creep in when he worries if there will ever be a wedding. Of course there will. The doubts materialize when they're out like this, at a social event, when he can feel people look at them and wonder.

“No date yet?” Aunt Sharon had said, eyeing him, hefting her mass up the hill after the burial. She was wearing a muumuu that his mom had smirked at. “Well, what's the rush, anyway?” She lit a cigarette, pausing to exhale through her nostrils. “It's better to wait. You kids are too young.”

Twenty-seven isn't young, he wanted to retort. And who was she to be giving advice? None of his friends are married yet, true. Dave had howled in protest when Leo announced the engagement. “You're in your prime!” Dave had said, aghast.

They didn't see that waiting was pointless. Because if he and Nora want the house, the kids (three, he imagines, playing out different combinations of boy/girl), they have to start taking steps. He isn't supposed to mention it, but Nora's birthday is approaching in August, her twenty-eighth. And after the wedding, the honeymoon (Hawaii, he imagines, lush and warm, too hot to quarrel; lethargy; flowers of idleness), she will be that much closer to thirty.

It's just a matter of time, he always tells himself. He has to be patient and not press, be patient and seem unconcerned. It is what the Pistons have been doing, defense beating offense, patience beating pizzazz. Hold back, wait. The meek shall inherit the earth.

He is part of a delicate operation with Nora that he himself barely understands. Is she better? Recovered? Not worse? It is a complicated dance requiring him to tread lightly, so lightly, on the balls of his feet. He cannot worry about his game plan, about the points on the scoreboard, because then any momentum will be lost. He has to bide his time, feel out Nora's rhythm. The pesky questions must be kept at bay. Stephen had started hanging out with him, after all, just when Leo had stopped caring.

That is the economics of life, the market of the heart driven by supply and demand, just like everything else. When you want too much, too openly, life sees your hunger and contracts. You have to conserve your desire, hold it close. Not mind as time unfolds, testing you. Not mind the sparseness, the seeming lack. No roses without thorns.

Six

P
enny for your thoughts,” Stephen says.

“I thought they'd be worth more,” Nora replies drily.

They are sitting in Leopold's black vehicular behemoth with the doors thrown open, the day finally having shed its damp chill. “Presumably a penny meant more back then. That saying goes back to the sixteenth century, at least.”

“God, how do you
know
this stuff ?”

“Comp exams.” The image of the volume floats up to him. Blue cloth, letters in gold. A compendium of proverbs through the 1500s.

Nora used to go for walks with him when he needed a break from studying. “Slow down!” she would yelp, his feet on pace with his thoughts. The streets felt surreal after so many hours at his desk. These people don't have to study, he would marvel, staring at the slow trickle of West Philly—old men shuffling along, young mothers corralling their children. The hypnotic swirl of the striped barber's shop pole on the corner, curving red, then blue. How distant it felt, a life outside of books.

Nora's shoes now sit abandoned on the floor mat. One foot dangles out the passenger side, the other folded beneath her. “They should adjust for inflation,” she muses. “ ‘Ben Franklin for your thoughts,' maybe.”

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.