NOTHING WAS THE SAME AFTER SAUL WAS GONE. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but I imagined it differently. I’d grown attached to him, used to being around him more closely, more rawly than he would’ve wanted. I admired him, not because he handled the illness so well—sometimes he didn’t—but because I understood by then who he was underneath it. He tried not to make things too difficult for Kirk or his sister or anyone taking care of him, and he had plenty of reasons to want to get Kirk’s goat. He acted as if he didn’t remember any of them.
I watched Kirk. He seemed to expect me to help, so I did. I thought, actually, that it drew us together to have these tasks. Getting Saul fed enough food that he liked, getting Saul settled tight in the bedsheets. I’d slip out the door not long after, and I’d go back to the life I had before I knew any of these people.
I wasn’t there as much once the hospice aides showed up for their shifts. He got four hours a day covered by insurance, and what upright souls those health aides were, guys from ravaged parts of all continents, walking through the door in their dark cotton scrubs to do the awkward bits.
I got to know Saul before the last part. People said my helping my lover’s ex-lover reminded them of the days of AIDS at its worst, when gay men rose to fine forms of team solidarity. Leukemia wasn’t like that; anyone could get it without trying. We were just a party of three with shifting factions. Saul made cracks about Kirk behind his back, he’d imitate his favorite sayings, and we’d laugh knowingly together. We both loved him, but that was our own business.
In those days, when he was still interested in talking, Saul decided to say to me, “Do you believe in secrets?”
“Well,” I said, “as a lawyer I have to have a tolerance for them. There’s the attorney-client privilege thing. You’re supposed to keep your mouth shut, as long as it’s not about buried bodies. Famous case of lawyers getting in trouble for that.”
Saul’s secret was that he’d stolen a rare book. He had taken it out of the library’s collection years ago just to look at—before the days when alarms shrieked at you, before computers logged every particle of matter—and he’d never brought it back. Nobody cared anymore, he was sure. And he wanted it sold now to leave a few bucks for Nadia. He had nothing else to will to her—any savings had long since been what they called “spent down” to let Medicaid kick in—and he really didn’t want the book listed as his and taxed. But someone could sell it discreetly. I pointed out that lawyers had reason to balk at doing illegal things. “Maybe you know someone,” he said. And he didn’t want Kirk to know about it. He didn’t want Kirk thinking poorly of him.
Kirk was three blocks away, buying ice cream. Did I want to see the book?
I could hardly believe what I saw. It was a first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a book I’d loved intensely as a boy. It was just a brown clothbound book with gilt letters on the cover, but it had the author’s signature, right there on the title page. I sort of swooned, though I knew that was silly of me. Robert Louis Stevenson! His handwriting. Cassell & Co., London, 1883.
“My mother used to read me his poems when I was little,” I said. “She told me the pleasant land of counterpane was just a quilt. A word that’s never come up since.”
“He was sick all his life. TB probably.”
“And she liked to say, ‘Home is the sailor, home from sea.’”
“‘And the hunter home from the hill.’ That’s his epitaph.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “We never knew that.”
“It says, ‘This be the verse you grave for me.’ And they did; it’s on his grave in Samoa.”
We were both silent for a minute. “It’s so vain,” Saul said, “to pick something out ahead of time.”
A bit of searching online turned up listings of similar copies (a few) selling at between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand dollars. Oh, there was the problem of its being stamped with the library’s ID, but Saul had already written a letter on library stationery saying it was being deaccessioned. He had done this almost two years ago, when Kirk first talked about leaving him.
I thought my sister might know someone who collected priceless objects, who’d think nothing of writing a check for a venerable volume. No, I didn’t want to drag my sister into this. I didn’t want to be in it myself. What was I doing?
And wasn’t Treasure Island a tale of how the lust for treasure made people betray and sabotage and murder one another? When I was eleven, my friend Mike and I used to go around chanting, “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest,” that rousing gory anthem. Violent pirates, a boy’s tale.
I had no problem assuring Saul I would absolutely not tell Kirk about the book. It wasn’t what I wanted to bring up anyway, in my snatched bits of time alone with the man who was still my boyfriend. We’d once had our long nights in that nice big apartment of his, making a royal progress from couch to bed to rug to bed and so on. After Saul was reinstalled on the premises, we had a different system. I’d send a Lyft to bring him down to my place—the whole length of Manhattan, Inwood to the Village—and we’d have our few hours to be a couple. We’d set the alarm so he wouldn’t sleep too long; I loved watching him sleep. We never said, This part won’t last forever, we’ll have more later, the future will be ours. But we thought it; we held each other, knowing that time was passing along.
I had no idea, when I first flirted with Kirk, that anyone else was on the scene. We met on a train, of all places. I was going to see a friend in the Hudson Valley; he was on his way to an art directors’ conference in Beacon. “Conferring means bullshitting,” he said, in an archly charming way. We got to talking about the river outside the window, the glimmering, light-filled expanse of it. “I always think this is one of the great train rides,” he said. I asked if he had traveled much—it turned out neither of us had really. We meant to. “Next year in Tahiti,” he said.
“It’s a date,” I said.
Our first date was not in the South Seas but at a bar with a view of the Manhattan skyline, very gorgeous at sunset, quite near my apartment in the West Village. He did tell me, over our mojitos, that he was sort of at the end of a relationship and they hadn’t really stopped living together yet. Did that bother me?
“Nothing bothers me,” I said, one of the bigger lies I’ve ever told. I thought if I was lighthearted, whatever we did would be easier for him. I would’ve said almost anything not to lose him before I had him. I was perfectly ready to make any bargains.
“He might be sick but it’s not anything contagious,” Kirk said. “Probably blood cancer.”
He really said that. I wanted to ask him to repeat it but I didn’t.
“It’s hard to go home,” he said. “It’s pretty gloomy at home.”
If he was trying to get my sympathy vote, it was entirely unnecessary. I didn’t mind being his fling, his bad-boy hobby. I was well over forty and medium in looks; I hadn’t been anyone’s fling in years.
“He knows we’re over,” Kirk said.
I didn’t want Kirk to say any more. Why did I think he was so great? I had reasons but they weren’t real reasons. I was entirely gone over into wanting him.
And after we had our first time together, later that night but not too much later, I lay in bed floating on the immense certainty that I had, after all, a golden life. Better than I could have guessed. For however long. Luck had come to me; sometimes it does that.
I waited as long as I could before trying to explain Kirk to my mother. “It’s very complicated,” I told her. “You know how New York housing is.”
“He’s sick?” my mother said. “The guy he’s leaving is sick?”
“He looks fine. You’d think he was fine if you saw him. He won’t be alone. Kirk will keep helping.”
“Did you ever read David Copperfield?”
I admitted not.
“He marries a pretty girl who turns out to be annoyingly childish and who conveniently falls ill. On her deathbed she tells him he’s better off without her, and then he marries someone else. He has a vision of his first wife’s spirit shining forth from his second wife’s eyes to bless him. So he gets both at once. Double success. He’s very pleased with himself.”
Was she thinking of my father? Of his two Abbys?
“Men are no good,” I said, though I was happy at the time.
“Watch out for yourself,” she said.
I would’ve liked to show my mother the Treasure Island with Stevenson’s amazing signature. But it was Saul’s secret, not mine. Kept for years, grown from a mistake to an ambition. I was there when Saul told his sister the tale of his purloined volume. Kirk was working late; Rachel and I were getting dinner together. We were doing dance moves to avoiding colliding in that tiny kitchen, goofing around, when Saul came to the doorway to tell her about this book he had. Was she alarmed that her brother the librarian—a man of moderate habits and intelligent judgments—had committed what was definitely grand larceny? “Oh, Saul,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to think of Nadia.”
Nobody seemed to want to give it back to the library. The library had been balky about Saul’s benefits and was not in good favor in this household—why give them money? Readers could read other copies, right?
And Saul had always been so penny-pinching, scolding Rachel and me when we splurged on gourmet treats to nourish him, as if he’d been keeping the book a secret from himself as well. Now he was changed overnight into the holder of a sizeable stash, don of the sickroom.
We all knew that thieves got caught when they tried to sell the goods. Did we know this from newscasts or from detective stories? Saul said it showed how useful crime fiction was. He was a lifelong fan.
“Maybe we can sell it overseas,” Rachel said.
“I’m not sending it to your boyfriend in Cambodia,” Saul said.
“Nobody has money in Cambodia,” Rachel said.
“Singapore,” I said.
A search showed there was only one rare bookstore in Singapore (for English-language books), an elegant spot—didn’t we want a smaller and shadier outfit? Apparently, libraries were busy getting rid of their books and digitalizing everything, but rare books still had a market. Crazy rich Asians needed to buy things, I was sure. Not that I knew anything about any of this. But there had to be sneaky private dealers of antique items in that city, if a person knew how to find them. Could a Chinese-speaker help me? Or was that a whole other world? Maybe I’d go to Singapore myself.
And then we got distracted. Saul took a turn for the worse. He reported pain—anyone could see it cast its shadow over whatever expression his face had—and after too many bad days, he was properly drugged so he could fall into off-and-on napping. Sometimes I helped get him sitting up in bed to let Kirk feed him from a tray. Once he was up, I was no longer wanted in the room. The plans for getting cash for the book seemed like a frivolous and bizarre fantasy. A nutty idea very far from the heart of the matter.
It was too long, this stage when he was stretched on the vicious rack of his cancer, but afterward he seemed to have faded out just like that, without giving us a chance to get enough of him before he was gone. And the health aides were there in those last weeks, lifting and hoisting and helping, more adept and less afraid than we were.
Kirk asked if I didn’t mind not going to the funeral. “It’s too weird for me to bring a date,” he said. “You know what I mean.”
I thought I could sit in the back but he didn’t think so.
“We’ll talk later,” he said. “Don’t nag me. Now is not the time.”
“You’re banning me?” I said. “What is this about?”
“I’m not getting into it now.”
“You’re the one who decides who gets to mourn Saul? He would hate this, he would totally hate it.”
“Don’t tell me about Saul,” he said. “You have no right.”
“I have no fucking rights of any kind,” I said, and that was the end of that conversation.
The service was at a Jewish funeral home in the Bronx that his sister found; the prayers would’ve been familiar to me. I thought of coming anyway, but I was ashamed to bring any feuding into such a place. I hated not being there. I never would’ve let Saul down by just skipping it, as if I were too busy. I sent his sister a note by email, to say I was honoring Kirk’s request.
The funeral must’ve had speeches extolling and loving Saul and granting him his new sanctity as one of the dead. I knew what they’d say. In Kirk’s case, as he sat in the first row, all of it had the further effect of reminding him (over and over, with each speech) how much he regretted his collusion with me. How very much. We’d gone into it together, our long, impatient betrayal of Saul.
“You always told me nothing bothered you, why didn’t it?” he couldn’t wait to ask me. “What was the matter with you?” He said this over the phone, four days after the funeral. I’d had to keep calling at different times before I reached him.
“It’s better if you just don’t say anything,” he said. “I don’t think I could stand to hear it.”
This was Kirk, the prize I’d been waiting for. I’d gotten everything wrong, hadn’t I?
“I know you can argue, you’re a lawyer, but don’t,” he said. “Just don’t, okay?”
“Maybe we should talk at a later time,” I said.
“I don’t think so. I really do not.”
There was a pause, and what was I listening for next?
“Did you hear me?” Kirk said. How eager he was for me to disappear. The sign of his corruption.
“Well,” I said. “Fuck. That’s it then.”
My sister, Allyson, said, “I never liked him,” though she’d only met him once and they’d gotten quite hilarious talking about some high-end restaurant.
My mother said, “People get over these things.” She meant it as good news.
“And he made me miss Saul’s funeral,” I said. It was demoralizing to long for someone I was on my way to despising. “Not that funerals are so great.”
“In Thailand,” my mother said, “everybody walks past the covered body and they pour perfumed water on the corpse’s right hand—you know, for purifying—and they ask forgiveness for any quarrels they had.”
“I never quarreled with Saul,” I said.
It was true we’d had disputes about why he refused to eat something he’d just asked for, and always we had our silent subterranean quarrel about who got to have Kirk. Saul had won that battle and he didn’t even know.
I dreamed over and over about Saul. In the dreams I was always thrilled to see him, out of the blue like that. Hey, Saul. There you are. He looked much better than he had before he died, not withered and skeletal anymore. In one dream, he was complaining that he wanted a warmer sweater, was that too much to ask, and I was looking all over and couldn’t find the one he wanted anywhere.
Was he a ghost?
And I dreamed of Kirk too, who was definitely not a ghost. In one dream he was ravenous for sex. In another he was locking me into a large metal trunk, no matter how I resisted. In another he was baking a cake that burned and then something else happened I couldn’t remember. My sleep life was not helping me.
I was moving through the days, putting one foot in front of the other, trying to focus at work (we had a libel case that would’ve been interesting had I been interested) and letting friends give their well-meant and patronizing pep talks, when I got a message from Saul’s sister, Rachel. It was about the copy of Treasure Island, which she still had.
At first, she wrote, Nadia wanted to keep it, to have something of his, but she has his Buddha and a bunch of other things. Now she’s thinking about her future. Maybe we can meet and you can help me review possibilities.
I could not advise her to do anything illegal. Reviewing was perhaps something else. I was really very glad that she wanted to see me.
I met Rachel in some café she liked on Eighth Avenue in the Fifties. We hugged fondly, which we’d actually never done before. When I said how sorry I was about Saul, she said that the one having the most trouble now was Nadia.
“She’s a good kid,” I said.
In fact, Nadia hated me for a long time. If she saw me in the elevator, she’d turn her head and look elsewhere. She got used to me once I was around more, doing tasks for Saul. We’d been known to laugh at the same joke. She herself was not that helpful, except for reading to Saul sometimes. He liked that.
“She’s had a lot of instability in her life,” Rachel said. “And I was sort of planning to go away in a month. To Cambodia, just a couple of weeks. I’m not thrilled about leaving her on her own.”
“I can look in on her,” I said. “Take her to dinner, if you think she’d go with me.”
“You can try,” Rachel said. “Thank you. She loves Mexican food. Well, you’ve seen that.”
“Glad to do it,” I said.
“Have you ever been to Singapore?”
“Not me,” I said.
“I’m going to stop there on the way back from Cambodia. My friend Bud knows someone there. To get the book sold.”
“It’s supposed to be a great city.”
“Do you know—I thought you would know—is there a limit to how much cash you can bring back to this country?”
“Ten thousand. Otherwise you have to report it.”
“What can they do to you?”
“Well, they can take it from you. There could be fines or civic or criminal penalties. It’s not really my area, you know that.”
“So we’d have to split it,” Rachel said. “Bud could carry half. He’d have to come back with me. Or visit me later.”
“If you trust him,” I said.
She looked startled at this. I’d offended her.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve read too much about men plotting mutiny to get the treasure map.”
“I guess,” she said.
You could say, if you wanted to, that a dying man’s last wish was being carried out in this planned excursion to the underbelly of Singapore. Rachel undoubtedly saw it as a mission of honor.
If her friend didn’t know what the hell he was doing, there were risks even I’d read about. Transactions with “unlawful societies” (what we would call the Mob) in Singapore were punishable by strokes of the cane as well as prison. They didn’t do it to women.
Her friend surely knew all that. I said, “Have a great vacation.”
My dreams got weirder. In one I was setting up a deal with Saul: if I bought him a new apartment, a pricey one in Chelsea, with a balcony overlooking the High Line, he’d get Kirk to come back to me, he’d talk him into it. “I can do it,” he said. “People listen to me now.” On a different night, I dreamed that Saul and I left a bar together and strolled along the river toward a deserted mansion that I knew was the house of the dead. No lights on. I walked him to the gabled front door and started to go inside, but I didn’t get further than the black hallway before I woke up. A friend at work said his Chinese grandmother would say it was actually auspicious to dream about your own death. It could mean a rise in prosperity or that you were about to start a new stage of life. “Hey,” I said, “I’m ready.” The dream had not felt that cheerful to me, but I wasn’t about to argue against any grandmothers.
I spoke to Rachel once more before she left, and she talked about Nadia, how outraged she still was. “She’s mad about what life is,” Rachel said. “That nothing lasts, that no one does. That we lose everything. She doesn’t like it. It was okay when the Buddha said it but not now.” Essentially Nadia and I were on the same page.
I called her the day after Rachel took off for Cambodia. She was very surprised to hear my voice. “Ethan?” she said.
I said I had a big hunger for tacos al pastor and I knew she liked that kind of thing so maybe she would keep me company. The place had good elote too.
“Really good?” she said. “Not under-grilled?”
She was wearing stagey eye makeup, dark feral outlines, when I got to the restaurant. Why was I doing this? My connection to these people was Kirk, who was lost and out of sight.
“The menu looks so typical,” Nadia said.
But we did better after that. I said I’d heard Mexican cuisine was very regional and I asked if she ever thought about going to Mexico. “I wanted to take Saul to Jamaica,” she said. “He didn’t want to go.”
“You know the only place I’ve ever been,” I said, “is Iceland. My mother’s idea. We ended up going in summer, when it stays light at night, this dreamy twilight. I loved that.”
“Nothing wrong with Jamaica. He can’t go anywhere now.”
I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but I knew most of Asia believed in reincarnation. What did she think of that?
“I want to talk to him,” she said. “That doesn’t help.”
Nothing was going to help; we had to help ourselves. Right now I was no better at this than Nadia.
She was eating enough, which I took as a good sign. “I hated all the hypocrisy at the funeral,” she said, chewing.
“People don’t know what to do,” I said. “They can’t always say what they mean.”
“So when can they? When do they stop lying?”
She had me on that one. “Don’t ask me now. I’ll remember eventually.”
I felt terrible being the cynical old guy just when she was fallen into darkness. “No, you won’t,” she said, with a snide little lilt.
I never should’ve taken her anywhere. I was the wrong person.
“With the light always on in Iceland,” Nadia said, “don’t they get confused about where they are in the day?”
“They have skills we don’t have,” I said. “That’s what travel is.”
“How do you know if you’ve only been to one place?”
“Forget I said anything.”
What this meal was doing was baring my despair. It reminded me how old I was, how limited my stock of chances was. It was a cruel and dark time for Nadia, but anyone could see she had a long string of hearts ahead of her.
“I can’t believe Rachel really wanted to go to Cambodia,” she said. “That guy brainwashed her.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You know how long it takes to get there? And what it costs?”
I finished my ear of corn. “How’s school?” I said.
“Kirk is an asshole,” Nadia said, to be nice to me.
I sent an email to Rachel to tell her I’d seen Nadia. Rachel wrote, I’m liking Phnom Penh—great palace, temples, food. But even when I was young, I don’t think I ever visited a place this poor. And we think we have problems. Bud is a good guide.
Nice to hear she was getting along with Bud. Maybe old boyfriends were a good idea. Tony, my ex, had moved to Washington, D.C., which was not that far away. But didn’t I know better than to repeat old mistakes? Of course, he might have changed.
My friend Mike used to have theories about reincarnation, when we were teenagers. “Can’t kill energy,” he would say. Did anyone want to be reborn just as reordered elements released into the ether? (This was Nadia’s point too.) What was the good of continuing in another form? Mike said, “We get too stuck in particularity. Think big.” He had the temperament of a brainy kid. Now when I couldn’t sleep, I tried to remember what that meant, thinking big.
I was doing better, I thought, when I suddenly got a phone call from Rachel, late at night. “Are you back already?” I said. She was not back. She was still in Phnom Penh, and she had just discovered, trying to withdraw from an ATM, that she had no money in her checking account. She tried other ATMs, other banks, but it looked like someone in Cambodia had gotten into the account—a person who’d been in line after her at a cash machine, or hovered near her at a local bank. People had ways. In a Third World country, the thirty-five hundred in the account was life-changing, more than twice the median income. She’d been trying to let Nadia know, since Nadia used the card too. But there was no way to get hold of Nadia. Not answering texts, emails, phone calls. Had I seen her lately? I had not.
And then the bank at home, Rachel said, told her that the withdrawals had been from New York banks. A whole sequence of withdrawals over a few days. A customer-service woman at the bank read her the locations. In the West Forties, where the apartment was; in Chelsea, where Nadia’s school was.
“So Nadia took the money,” she said. “Mystery solved.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
Couldn’t Nadia’s card just have been stolen? And then the thief somehow figured out the password, like a safecracker listening to the dial? A genius techie.
“Can you see if you can find her?” Rachel said.
I found her at school. I knew from Rachel that she had an eleven o’clock class, and I spent some of my lunch break waiting outside the main FIT entrance on West Twenty-Seventh Street for her to exit. I must have looked like a stalker, standing with my coffee while all those hiply dressed kids, girls in draped layers and boys with zany glasses, swarmed by me. She was wearing the same funny plaid dress she’d worn to dinner, definitely not in disguise. “Hey, Nadia!” I said.
“Ethan?” she said.
She hadn’t run away with the cash to Paris, or to the beaches of Jamaica either. Maybe she never took a cent.
“I can’t get in touch with Rachel,” I said. “Have you heard from her? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” Nadia said. “Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I was going to send her money. She’s run out of cash and she’s stranded. I’m worried now.”
“She’s fine,” Nadia said. “She has that Bud guy.”
“Let’s hope he hasn’t deserted her. Not having money is serious.”
“Excuse me,” Nadia said, to two young women I now saw were with her. “I have to talk to this person.”
She led me to the corner of the street, away from the crowd. “Rachel has charge cards,” she said. “You don’t even know her and you’re all worried about her. No one is worried about me.”
“Oh, I’m worried,” I said. “I see where you’re going. I’m a lawyer.”
“I have a crap father and now I have you too?”
“Rachel loves you,” I said. “Maybe you can send her some money. Do you have savings?”
“Me?” she said. “Maybe a little.”
“Since you know where she is,” I said. “And I don’t. That would help. I’m sure she’d be very grateful.”
“She doesn’t care what I do.”
“Oh, please.” I sighed, which meant, Listen to yourself, and we left it at that.
I worked in civil litigation, but Tony, my ex, did matrimonial law, and he used to tell me that people filing for divorce were always trying to collect, in the form of money, payment for what could never be paid for. How literal they were, listing their highly graphic complaints. The suffering was real, the money was real, but the relation between the two was a delusion. Which the world was full of. Love and money were always twisted and tangled, always mistaken for each other. Nadia had been doing so much better before Saul got really sick. She was probably angry at the Buddha too.
I thought of her chanting to the Buddha for Saul. She did it sometimes in Kirk’s apartment. May he live with ease. Kirk and I, the nonbelievers, would look at each other with something between amusement and heartbreak. How enchanted I was with Kirk then; the drama of Saul had become something precious to me, because of him. I’d go home from those evenings, after our not-too-lingering kiss at the door, with a feeling like joy in wait.
Probably love always has its ironies. As a child I had been very shocked to learn that genitals were involved in adult romance—it made no sense, when I was five. So I’d lived all these years with the comic tyrannies of the body, their ungainliness and majesty. Whatever wild sweetness I’d had with Kirk no longer seemed glorious, but I missed it all the time. Every minute.
The money didn’t all come back into Rachel’s account but most of it did. When Rachel looked at her balance onscreen again, it was up to twenty-eight hundred. She phoned me late at night to tell me. “What did you do?” she said. “A miracle.”
“We spoke in secret code,” I told her. “Like pirates. Well, not code, really, but veiled allusions. We liked it.”
We weren’t passing off any black spots to Long John Silver on torn Bible paper but we had our understanding, we were in league. So it felt. But who knew what Nadia would think of to do next?
“And I thought it was just some poor Cambodian,” Rachel said. “Thank God I didn’t accuse anyone. It shows how wrong you can be.”
“Things are okay otherwise? You have enough?”
“I thought Nadia was done with all that. It’s not like I get a huge salary. She knows that. I didn’t see this coming. I should have but I didn’t want to.”
“Has she ever taken anything before?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“She’ll be all right,” I said. “You going to Angkor Wat?”
“I don’t even care anymore,” she said. “But we’re going.”
I told my mother the whole story about Nadia stealing. Being my mother, she was full of praise for my cleverness with her. We were having brunch at her house, wolfing down bagels with the kippered salmon I liked.
“After all that Rachel’s done for her,” I said.
“Pretty usual,” my mother said. She had taught middle school long enough to have seen everything. Changing fads in lunacy and disruption and inventive adolescent cruelty had passed under her gaze for years.
Did that make her calmer, not to be surprised each time?
“Yes,” she said. “In my case it did.”
It made me glad to hear it. Tony used to say that my mother was much less ignorant than most people. He meant exactly this. She tended to know what mattered and what didn’t.
“She’s not the worst, this Nadia,” my mother said.
In the early days, Kirk used to take me for walks in Inwood Park, which was quite a spectacular park, an expanse of radiant nature, foresty hillsides and a pond on which ducks swam and white egrets hovered in the distance, a place entirely unknown to me before then. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. I took its remarkable vistas as a sign of Kirk’s greatness, as new lovers do. It was not that far from the apartment, so I should not have been so wounded when in later days Saul spoke of the great picnics he and Kirk had had there, the beautiful trails they got lost on. I hated hearing about the tulip trees. But I pretended I had never seen the place. “It’s near here?” I said. I could do that much for Saul.
I went to walk there now, on a late Sunday afternoon when I had no business in the neighborhood. It was winter by this time, though the park was still pretty, even in its bareness. I told myself I was saying goodbye to all this, though I probably hoped to see Kirk slip out from behind an oak tree.
I saw a baby raccoon up a tree, actually, which was exciting. A masked hoodlum—I wanted to take a picture, as if he were a fabulous tourist discovery. This was like travel for a New Yorker, wasn’t it? I got the back of him, his furry behind with its striped tail, before he moved. My mother would like that shot.
My sister, Allyson, said, “You’re doing so well, I think. After the breakup, I mean.” I was furious at her for this. I thought it was an insult to my sorrow, to the true rottenness of losing Kirk, who was better than anyone would say now. And an extra insult to my mourning for Saul, which she didn’t know that much about. “Thank you,” I said, just to get the whole issue off the table.
My sister meant well. Everyone wanted me back the way I was. Which was not what I even wanted.
It wasn’t that long before Rachel was back in New York. “It was a fantastic trip,” she said on the phone. “I know it didn’t sound like that at certain times but it was.” She had a souvenir for me; we would have brunch, yes?
She arrived wrapped in two wool scarves over her coat. “It’s hard to get used to winter again,” she said, untwining herself. “You wouldn’t believe how hot Singapore was.”
“New York must seem like a mirage,” I said. It was January and twenty degrees outside, with some really mean winds.
“It’s all a mirage,” she said, happily.
This was a good thing?
“And Singapore’s not all fancy, like people think. I was in a hawker center eating fried dough for breakfast three days ago.”
“Did you sell Treasure Island?”
“It’s a long story,” she said.
Bud, her friend, was somehow friends with a Brit who helped run a community addiction-recovery center (lot of gambling addicts, he said) in an eastern edge of Singapore. He couldn’t introduce Bud to anyone, not directly, but he could show him who to talk to. They went to a coffee place nearby and he pointed to a table of old Chinese men in the corner playing backgammon. That is, two of them were playing; the others were watching and waiting. The players looked like old men at a game anywhere—could’ve been dominoes, poker, craps—very intent, not speaking, lost in strategy. The guy they needed to talk to was the clean-shaven one in the dark blue shirt, with a scar on his cheek.
“We were not invisible in the café,” Rachel said. “Every single person noticed us. I had no idea how to read that room. And I had to think, We’re out of our depth here. Bud was saying he knew how to handle it, not to worry. And if he didn’t know? I didn’t want him showing off, risking our necks or whatever. What would Nadia do if I never came back? I told him I’d changed my mind. Which I really, really had.”
“He was okay with this?”
“Bud was insulted. He didn’t say much except, ‘You’re sure?’ His friend had already left; I knew he’d be embarrassed to have to tell him the whole thing was for nothing. And when we were walking around on the street, he said, ‘Why did we bother to come here then?’ I had no answer.”
Not the story I expected.
“But you know what? He got over it. By the evening he’d decided that Singapore was a great place to visit, this was a good accident. We had fun. Temples, mosques, dancing in the street, Malay food, Indian food. It’s much more fun there than people say.”
“You still have the book?”
“I have it on a shelf next to other things he liked—an ice cream dish and some detective novels by Dashiell Hammett. Sort of a shrine to Saul. Nadia can decide what to do with it when she’s older.”
“Keep it safe.”
“I had her read it in paperback. She loved Long John Silver.”
“Freedom is a great thing.”
“Yes,” she said. “He gets away in the end, doesn’t he? Escapes from the ship taking him to prison. He and his parrot.”
“Would Saul have liked his shrine?”
“He liked being loved. And for us, it reminds us that love is not in vain.”
I had spent the last few months thinking that it was. “Didn’t the Buddha think so?”
“I think that’s a misreading,” Rachel said. “We have to ask Nadia. She’s been on Buddhist webs again—she’s the expert.”
Nadia was an expert on anything? They must be getting along better.
“We had a talk,” Rachel admitted, rolling her eyes. She could joke about forgiveness. “A really long talk.”
“Think you’ll ever go to Cambodia again?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Often, if I can.”
Rachel had brought me a souvenir of Angkor Wat. It was a refrigerator magnet of molded plastic that showed four women dancing—they had bare breasts and very narrow waists and wore fabulous towering headdresses as they crooked their knees and raised their elegant arms in chorus. Rachel said they were apsaras, spirits of clouds and waters, carved all over the Angkor temples.
I still had it in my coat pocket when I went to visit my mom a few days later.
“She brought you a girly picture?” my mother said.
“They’re guardians,” I said. “That’s what she told me. They protect the king of the gods by seducing his enemies.”
I wondered as I said it whether I had seemed to Rachel to be in need of seductive backup. Maybe I had already slept with all my enemies.
Well, that sounded bitter. Could I not think of Kirk as a mere deluded human? Dreaming in too many ways about his right to escape?
“It’s very nice that she thought of you,” my mother said.
My mother was afraid I was going to keep getting myself into miserable love catastrophes. She always wanted to hear I had friends.
“Rachel liked Cambodia,” I said. “Thinks about going again.”
My father never went to Cambodia, but my mother had drawerfuls of the trinkets and fabrics he brought back to her from other places. She still wore all the terrific silk scarves, which she liked and chose not to be negatively sentimental about. Brocades and batiks. She had her own apportionment of feelings, my mother. She lit a Yahrzeit candle on the yearly anniversary of my father’s death, no matter, she said, what her opinions were.
My mother was someone with plenty of strong opinions, but they were lesser to her around big deals like death. People all over the world set out candles for the dead, the flames standing in for souls. (Buddhists didn’t believe in souls, Nadia had told me. They lit candles anyway.) My mother had plenty of reasons not to wish my father well, but every year she bought that wax-filled glass at the kosher market. It was what a serious person did, took a longer view. If my father, wherever he was, was not grateful, she didn’t take it personally. She thought that question was a mistake. She lit the flame just before sundown out of a larger project.
I was with her one night, watching her light it in the kitchen. Would my father have cared that he was being honored on the windowsill over the sink? He’d be glad enough, I thought, and surprised too, if surprise is available to someone on the other side of this life. He would hardly have recognized the kitchen, which had been redone since his time. I was remembering when we all used to slide on the linoleum in our socks. My father did fancy loops and skids. He was a fun dad when he wanted to be. I did wonder (not for the first time) how my mother came to choose him. I of all people should’ve understood it, the sunny opacity that love can induce. They’d met in a line outside a phone booth (no more of those), in another century. I knew that century, I wasn’t young either. (I used to taunt Kirk for being older, another thing to regret.) How matter-of-fact my mother was as she struck the match, how excellent it was for me to see her.