I see you everywhere (39 page)

Like every guest who enters the loft, Ralph is drawn to the large window in the living room. The view isn’t grand or panoramic, but it’s very New York: we’re just a floor or two above most adjacent rooftops, so Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 263
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we look out on makeshift sky gardens, sunbathers, and air-conditioning turbines. Campbell and his sons call it the “twenty-seven-water-tower view.” If you challenge them, they’ll count you through it. Sometimes I demand this performance, just for the amusement. They’ve turned it into a family act, a cross between hip-hop and vaudeville.

“Toto,” says Ralph, “I don’t think we’re in the rain forest anymore.”

He turns and smiles at me, so warmly that my anxiety dissolves. Here is the man I remember, the friend (and boss) of my sister who radiated kindness as well as confidence, on whom I had a crush for one brief night of dancing to Marvin Gaye on a Burlington jukebox; who, the next day, witnessed what remains my most humiliating moment, the time I nearly drowned at that swimming hole and Clem saved my life before an audience of strangers. Later she insisted I wouldn’t have drowned, that what she did—talk me out of a panic—was no big deal. I pointed out that if my situation really
hadn’t
been so dire, I’d be doubly mortified. “Okay, so definitely I saved your life,” Clem said, “which means you owe me one.”

Over the next decade, whenever we came together, she enjoyed ribbing me in front of our friends. With a glint in her eye, she’d make offhand remarks like “Wasn’t that the same summer I saved your life?” She even referred to it in a toast at my first wedding—telling Hugh that by extension he owed her bigtime. I might have minded, and told her so, but I enjoyed her attention, which I saw as proof of a deep bond between us, never mind that we saw so little of each other, that our lives had grown so differently and distantly busy that we wrote and called less and less often. Recently, when I tried to conjure the scene of that wedding dinner, of Clem’s toast, I realized that I am losing the sound of her voice, that I’ve already lost the memory of her laugh. It’s both comforting and painfully confusing to remember this: that my sister loved to laugh. Ralph accepts a beer. He sits in a chair facing the view. I sit across from him, with a glass of water. If I have wine now, I’ll lose control of my logic—and my emotions.

Henri sits beside me, Darius on his lap. I see Ralph appraising us as a pair. This would be an immediate puzzle, since I am pale and Henri’s Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 264 264

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dark. “Henri is my godson,” I say. “My
favorite
godson.” I hug him to my side.

Ralph is now looking around at what he can see of the loft, at the objects that overshadow the simple furniture. At the far end, above Henri’s Lego zoo, hang Campbell’s antique Mardi Gras masks, a collection from his days at Tulane, but most of the walls are taken up by the artwork I own, much of it given to me by the artists I love best. “Wow,” says Ralph, and I realize that our hasty, hurtling conversation on the A train, only five stops long, did not fill him in on very much of my life. I wonder if he remembers anything about the life I was living when I met him in Vermont. It occurs to me that in fact he may not have remembered
me,
even when I introduced myself on the train. But of course he remembers Clem. Who wouldn’t?

“Henri’s father,” I say, “is one of the artists I represent at my gallery—

at the gallery I share with my partners.” I look up, to point out the piece that dominates the loft once you see it. A great web of fine white feathers, knit ingeniously, invisibly together, droops delicately from above, as if the ceiling has become the underbelly of a mammoth gull or egret. I blush, thinking of Ralph’s work with birds.

“Wow,” Ralph says again. “Now that is something.”

“That’s my dad’s,” Henri brags.

“Wow. Your dad has quite the imagination.”

“I think the feathers came from a place that supplies pillow makers,” I offer, and then feel even more embarrassed.

“You’re not offending me here,” says Ralph. “I’m not an animal-rights extremist. Please.” He stands and begins to look at other pieces of art arranged in the room around us. He asks about a photograph and a sculpture. Certain that he’s only being polite, I keep my answers short.

“Now here we have something downright avant-garde,” he says, pointing to a pair of hockey sticks leaning against the doorway to the boys’

bedroom.

“My stepsons. Luke and Max.”

“I get to stay in their room, but I don’t live here,” says Henri. “I live in Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r2.qxp 7/28/08 7:55 AM Page 265
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Long Island City. I have my own bedroom when I’m at home. I have a bed
and
a hammock. Sometimes I sleep in my hammock.”

“I sometimes sleep in a hammock, too,” says Ralph. “Outside, even.”

Henri nods. “You live in the jungle.”

I smile at him, wondering if Ralph and I will be able to have a continuous conversation—or if, secretly, I hope we won’t. What was I thinking, inviting him over? And what could the poor guy do but say yes? I’m sure it’s clear to both of us that what I want is for him to shed more light on Clem’s life—and, by implication, her death. He did know about it; by the second subway stop we passed, he’d told me how sorry he was; what a waste, what a loss, how awful for our parents.

Henri informs Ralph, with obvious pride, that Luke is fifteen and Max is twelve. Max was born the same year Clem died.

“You’ll probably get to meet them for about three minutes,” I say,

“when they come roaring through to drop off their soccer equipment. You won’t meet my husband, though. I’m afraid he’s spending the weekend at one of those ghastly corporate golf things. He hates them—he hates golf—but it’s part of his job.”

“Is he in the art world, too?”

“Absolutely not,” I say. “For which I’m grateful. He handles real estate investments at NYU.”

“Ah!” says Ralph, as if this is a compelling job to someone who spends his life trying to figure out how we can undo the damage we’ve done to all the wild creatures around us—much of that damage involving real estate. On the A train, he told me he comes to New York a few times a year; he has an office at the Wildlife Conservation Society (the zoo, to those of us who take children up to the Bronx to see giraffes, gorillas, and all the fierce, coldhearted predators that we may be delighted
not
to number among the ever-increasing threats we face as city dwellers who are just too stubborn to flee).

I never thought I would end up pairing off so happily with a man whose livelihood is so unintriguing. I used to think that the man’s work has to be part of what seduces you. (You could see Hugh and Ray—a Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 266 266

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guy who taught high school history and, like me, loved art; and then a stuntman—as two ends of the curiosity spectrum.) But here’s the thing about Campbell: five years ago, on our first evening alone together (hard to call it a date at our stage in life), he told me he can take or leave what he does for a living. “You don’t need to ask polite questions about my job,” he said before we even ordered our meal. “I do it well, and I get a kick out of having this weird talent to which no kid would ever aspire; I mean, I wanted to be a movie critic! But I’m not sorry. It’s not my reason for being. It never has been.” He didn’t need to tell me his reason for being: by then I’d seen pictures of his sons, and I knew, all too well, the story of how he’d lost his wife. Yet even before she died, what mattered most to Campbell was family. Her death changed many things, but not that.

When you’re forty-four, childless, menopausal by way of chemotherapy, simply glad to be alive, how can you
not
fall madly in love with a man like that? Who cares what he does for a living? My cancer was, by then, seven years in the past. I couldn’t say I was cured, not quite, but I was beginning to think that my future might fit into something larger than a shoe box.

“Hungry?” I say to Henri, and he jumps up.

I place the bread in a basket. I put a platter of cheeses, grilled tomatoes, and olives on the table. Once we’re all seated, I serve the salad.

“This looks magnificent,” says Ralph. He thanks me effusively again. I repeat how glad I am to see him. I pour myself a glass of wine. Henri is occupied with Darius, keeping him upright. “No tomatoes, we both do not eat tomatoes,” he says when he gets the bear settled. Darius belonged to Clem; he was the “love child,” she used to joke, of her first and longest relationship, with her boyfriend from college and beyond. After she died, I found Darius among her belongings, and I made a feeble attempt to track down the old boyfriend. This was well before Google was a household verb, but even so, I didn’t try as hard as I might have. I wanted custody of Darius myself. Not even Henri may take him out of the loft.

“Henri wants to hear about your work,” I say to Ralph, “and so do I.”

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Ralph travels back and forth between Brazil and the Great Lakes. He is studying the effects of fertilizers and other waterborne chemical compounds, “industrial effluvia,” on bird populations in both areas. I remember now that when I met him he was writing a dissertation on basically the very same subject. It’s always amazing to me when people find the thing they were meant to do as soon as they grow up, they stick with it, and their passion never fades. I once believed my sister was one of these people.

As if reading my mind, Ralph says, “These plates are beautiful. They look handmade.”

“Yes,” I say. “By me. A long time ago. I used to be a potter.”

“That’s right!” he says. “Now I remember that! You lived in California, and you weren’t happy out there.”

I laugh. “No. I was a fairly miserable creature. I’m sorry you remember anything at all about me from back then.”

“I liked you, though. I did,” he says. “You and Clem both had the same . . . feistiness. I asked her about you later, how you were doing, and she said, ‘Oh, never worry about Louisa. She’ll figure things out. She always does.’ ”

“She talked about me?” I wonder if he’s making this up; Clem used to berate me for my lack of common sense.

“Sure. She talked about your parents, too. Not a lot, but she did.”

I hesitate. I don’t want to talk about my parents. In a way, they closed ranks after Clem’s death. They undertook home improvement projects they’d put off for years, took a cooking class in a foreign country, started going to black-tie benefits, installed an outdoor hot tub; behaved in ways that seemed inappropriately young to me yet struck the rest of the world as a huge relief, a sign of hope.
Good for them,
their friends would say. I understood later that what I really felt was a secret, shameful resentment, that they got to claim the lion’s share of all the sympathy and condolence. Even if it’s not their fault. Except for Campbell, no one ever asks me if I still miss my sister, if I’m angry or heartbroken, if the way she died—on purpose—still keeps me up at night.

Impulsively, I say, “How’s Hector?” When I met Ralph, he had a part-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 268 268

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ner, an equally charming man whose name I remember now only for its classical singularity. For an instant, I can’t help thinking of all the things that might so easily have separated them in unhappy ways—not just a breakup but AIDS. “Are you still . . . ? I realize . . .” What do I realize? Ralph has to finish chewing his bread, but he’s nodding. “Hector’s good,” he says. “He lives in New Bedford for now, with his mother, who needs him. We haven’t been together like that for years, but we stay in touch. He runs the aquarium in Mystic.”

“Oh,” I say, relieved yet stuck. “The two of you were such good friends to Clem. She had a blast with you.”

“The party years,” says Ralph. “I suppose we’re lucky to have had them
and
to have survived them.” His smile fades slightly. He digs into a second helping of salad. I notice that he’s pushed the dried cherries to one side. I feel as if there’s no escaping the sadness, as if I’ve merely pulled all our separate sorrows into a common center, a whirlpool. Ralph looks up at me abruptly, catching me off guard. He speaks softly. “She told me about your cancer. I guess you’re . . . You look great.”

The end of this awkward remark sounds like a question. He blushes.

“I’m fine,” I say quickly. I knock on the table. “But listen. I didn’t invite you here to be so unrelentingly morbid. I’m sorry.”

“What’s morbid?” asks Henri. Our sober tone has distracted him from the whispered discourse he was conducting with Darius.

“It means thinking too much about dark things,” I say.

“What dark things?”

“Sad things.”

“What’s sad? Are you sad?” He stares at me, alarmed.

“Not now,” I say. “We’re not sad right now. But sometimes people can be happy and remember sad things at the same time. Or we talk about other people being sad.”

“Like my dad. Because Tati died.”

“Yes,” I say.

“She was very, very old.”

“That’s true. But it’s always sad to say good-bye, even when you know someone had a good long life.”

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“I
know
that.”

Ralph leans across the table. “I love garlic bread, don’t you?” He’s offering a piece to Darius, which makes Henri laugh. Henri tells him that polar bears certainly wouldn’t like garlic bread, even if they did have stoves. Which they don’t. And you need a stove for garlic bread. Ralph is in the midst of telling Henri how he’s made garlic bread over a campfire when the front door opens wide and in barge my stepsons, shedding clods of dirt from their cleats, bringing with them the mingled smells of wet rubber, boyish sweat, and new grass—which tints their ruddy legs an unreal shade of green. They are snorting with laughter and, having raced up the stairs, breathless.