At four, the visiting nurse comes and Wally excuses himself to buy fresh bread. “Bye, Pa,” says Ann, and it irritates him, the affectation of “Pa”; he doesn’t understand what she means by it; it’s another thing he doesn’t know whether to worry about or not.
Outside, a blast of cold air slams down Pierrepont Street, damp air from the river, and he braces himself against it, shoulders hunched, chin tucked, his old furry shapka pulled low over his ears. Then, consciously, he unbraces himself, untenses his muscles, makes himself lower his shoulders and lift his chin, and the wind sweeps down his neck. Tolerance is something to be cultivated. He tries to conduct himself as though he’s in training.
One summer, when Ann was six or seven, they’d been in Amagansett, at Willette and Emil’s beach house. That was the summer Alice had sat for her portrait with Emil, and she and Ann had spent the whole month of August out there, and Wally, still working for the city then, had commuted on weekends. And Willette had been visiting her sick grandmother in Jamaica. And anyway, one night Ann had wanted to go swimming after supper, so Wally had taken her down to the beach; it was still light out, what movie people, he has since learned, call the golden hour, and Ann was washed in it, this gold broth, as she ran, in her plain black one-piece, in and out of the green foam-crested waves by herself, like a little bright sylph playing with her pet dragon. She had a great capacity not to need anyone else, and Wally could feel her farness from him, her total immersion in some child’s netherworld he could no longer begin to inhabit, and he’d watched her for some time from where he stood up on the beach, a little chilly even clad in long pants and shoes, until, eventually, she’d turned around and caught him smiling beatifically and demanded, “What?”
Wally, caught, suddenly shy, tried to put into words what he’d been feeling. “I just . . . I can’t believe I made you.” And Ann had shot him a properly grossed-out look and ordered, not unkindly, “Yeah, well, get over it,” and dived into a wave. And Wally understood that this was the icing on the cake: not only had he made her, but she had turned out to be her own real person, capable of correcting him, rejecting him, putting him in his place. And if he congratulated himself on having this understanding, at least he had it, at least he is adept at fathoming the world this way: every sad thing, every loss or hurt really a challenge to love that much more, really just another of beauty’s many strongholds.
That had been a strange summer, and of course there is no memory of that evening that does not include the knowledge of Alice and Emil back at the house alone together, as they were alone together all summer except for Ann. Wally standing there at water’s edge watching her brown limbs flashing dauntlessly in and out of the water, and him smiling through it, through all he knew, willing his head, his heart, to be big enough to take it all in and to hold it. Like holding his finger in a flame.
The memory turns to smoke; he crosses Henry Street. Wally James does not think of himself as a man suffering from a broken heart. He thinks of himself as a man bound to buy bread on a cold Monday. He approaches a Christmas-tree lot smelling of pine and exhaust. The man working in it looks miserable, hunched. The temperature seems to have plunged radically since this morning, and the sky is the dead gray of an old mattress, curbside. “Winter Wonderland” ekes its palsied way out of a dented boom box. As Wally passes, the tree man suddenly smiles at him: an Eastern European smile, stout and mustached and flecked with gold. Wally is almost compelled to offer his hand; he doesn’t, but it turns his heart, this man’s unexpected gift, and his own ability—he knows this is everything—to be open to it.
He catches sight of his reflection in the window of a parked van. He thinks of himself as a comfortable-looking man. He has enough money and health, and just enough age and girth, to project ease, nurturance, welcome. If he were a flag, his emblem would be the pineapple. If he were a minor Greek deity, he’d be affiliated with the hearth. But his fleeting image in the bottomless mirror of the van window comes back hollow, washed out, and wan, with deep furrows around his nose and across his brow, the shapka framing it all like a black hood. Startled by the image, and subsequently preoccupied with thoughts of morbidity and mortality, Wally bumps into an elderly man carrying several parcels, which scatter to the sidewalk. The man sighs: all the burdens of the world. Wally apologizes, scooping up the parcels, restoring them to the man’s arms with deft efficiency. The parcels have been clumsily wrapped, all in the same silver paper stamped with blue dreidels and menorahs; now a few have come partly undone. “Happy Hanukkah,” Wally says, pressing his hand to the man’s elbow, and watches as the man shuffles on down the block, bent into the wind, bearing his gifts.
The effort. The effort to will love. He is an athlete in training; the heart is a muscle. He sees the man turn in toward an entrance, watches over him until a navy-blue doorman victoriously wrestles the door open against the wind. Wally walks on.
Alice’s gift to him, the restaurant, had been so enormous and life-altering, nothing like whatever happy frivolities must be inside those Hanukkah parcels, completely unlike the gift of the Christmas-tree man’s sudden gilded smile, but that smile had been like a thread, however frail, binding in some brief, inconsequential way bestower and recipient, whereas Alice’s gift had had the opposite, snipping effect: liberating not only Wally from his job in city planning, but herself from the burden of her parents’ money, and also, ultimately, herself from Wally.
His mind darts for no reason to Esker’s kiss. It was strange to him. This in itself seems strange, since the restaurant business is full of hugs and kisses, and he is well accustomed to receiving the intimate gestures of strangers. Maybe it’s because she’s Ann’s teacher. But Prospect School faculty don’t as a rule trouble to maintain the air of professional distance that Wally remembers his own teachers carefully exuding. Maybe it’s because she was so prickly from the outset, so almost gruff about bandaging up his cut hand.
He’s now far enough from the water that the wind doesn’t cut so sharply. He slows his pace. From a low, curvy tree in the tight wedge of yard outside a brownstone, a clove-studded orange twirls on a red ribbon. He and his sister used to make them as kids, give them as Christmas presents to all their relatives. He still remembers the sore thumb he’d get from pushing the blunt cloves into the tough peel. Everywhere you go, he thinks, he wills himself to think, there are echoes of the familiar. Like signals, carefully planted signposts you have only to read.
When he pictures his childhood home, it’s always on a rough mental map, so that he’s aware of it existing north of where he currently lives, but he notices now that there’s another point on the map, making his own relative location one notch more specific. It has emerged of its own silent accord, again without reason, like a star that’s come out in the night sky; a moment ago there was blankness, and now, without fanfare, something definite has taken residence there. It’s Esker’s childhood home in the Adirondacks, a point north and west. New coordinates. The little globe of the clove-orange spins on its red ribbon.
The bakery he favors is near Parkes Cadman Plaza, and after he has chosen a round brown peasant loaf and some rolls dense with walnuts and raisins, he strolls across the green, the warm paper bag tucked under his arm, crunching the brittle grass, which is studded with little cakes of frozen dog do, candy wrappers, the odd condom, crack vial, and empty minibottle of schnapps. In the waning light, a big kid and a little kid are tossing around a blue foam football. The little kid misses it every time, and has to run to retrieve it. Wally knows their bare hands must be cold, because his are, even shoved in his pockets. He can hear both boys sniffing in that rattly, frozen way. The bread warms his armpit.
It comes to Wally what was unusual about Esker’s kiss. It had been exceedingly intentional. The rest of the visit, she’d been somehow oblique, had seemed to deflect everything slightly, even in the midst of all the repartee. But in that moment, he had felt the full, simple intent of her two lips.
He’d responded absurdly with that statement about Ann. It had seemed necessary to change the subject. Not for his sake, for hers. He has the thought that it will be important when she comes for dinner tonight not to scare her.