“OF COURSE WE NEED to bring the children,” Mirella told Howard on Wednesday evening. “I always spend Saturday with them. And this is only Randi’s first week”
“They’ll be fine,” Howard said. “We’ll leave Saturday morning and be back that night. Or we could stay over at Richard’s after the bas mitzvah and leave first thing Sunday.”
“I have to work this Sunday,” said Mirella.
“Whatever you decide is okay with me,” said Randi, who was chopping tomatoes on the butcher-block work island during this conversation. “It might be nice for you guys to have some time alone together.” And she smiled at them in the Quakerish way she had adopted whenever she referred to their couplehood, arch and innocent.
“Bet you haven’t had that in a while,” she added.
“Well, no—” Mirella began.
“They’ll be bored,” Howard insisted. “And you know Richard, he wants everything to be perfect. What if one of them starts fussing?”
“It’s so far away,” said Mirella.
Mirella stood in the kitchen, fingering the collar of her blouse and watching Randi chop tomatoes. The knife flashed up and down, tok, tok. Randi was making something she called tomato-and-egg pie. The lemon chicken she’d made the night before had been a success, except for the peas she’d served on the side, which unaccountably she had tossed with vinegar. But it had been such a welcome sight, the dinner table set, candles lit, each dish of food separately radiant.
“Mirella,” Howard said, “what’s the big deal?”
She realized that he had scheduled this conversation to take place in front of Randi. He wanted to go without the children and Randi, steadfastly chopping, wearing a striped apron that Mirella had bought once as a joke for Howard, was inarguably there to look after them.
“I don’t know.” Mirella twisted her watchband. “We’d planned to take them.”
“It would be so much easier not to,” said Howard.
Jacob sat on the kitchen floor, driving a wooden mail truck through a scatter of blocks, one or two balanced on top of each other. Block building was something he’d just begun to do, after Howard and Mirella had for months tried to coax him with tunnels, bridges, castles. Blocks are an essential tool in the development of fine-motor skills and logical reasoning, said a magazine article Mirella had read. Help your child by using blocks in constructive play. But it was Randi who got him interested. She gave him a peanut M&M for each block he stacked on top of another.
Now and then Jacob looked up, but whenever Mirella caught his eye, he looked away. Upstairs Pearl was singing to the dog. “I love you, you love me,” she sang, right on key.
“We won’t stay overnight,” Mirella decided at last. “We’ll leave right after the ceremony.”
“Really,” Randi said, laying down her knife, “I know it’s hard to leave them, but trust me, Mirella, they’ll be fine.”
A MOURNFUL-LOOKING PIANIST was playing ragtime in one corner of Temple Beth El’s social hall, near the linen-draped buffet. Seventh-grade boys wearing jackets and ties, blue jeans and yarmulkes, plunged through the crowd, their mouths flashing with braces, ignoring huddles of seventh-grade girls in skimpy rayon dresses and thick-soled black shoes. In the center of the room, on a large round table swathed in blue drapery, billowed an enormous bouquet of yellow roses. Waiters were wading here and there in white jackets and black pants, carrying platters of hors d’oeuvres. On the buffet one could choose from salmon medallions, roast beef au jus, potatoes Delmonico or potatoes lyonnaise. Salad was to be served first, by waiters, as was the soup and the dessert. Floating island, Vivvy had said.
On the far wall, behind the buffet, hung a life-sized photograph of pouty Danielle Goldman, which, by some computer wizardry, had been insinuated into an enlarged photograph of a popular young movie star. The movie star was passionately embracing Danielle, who had her hair in her face and seemed to be sulking over something, Mirella thought, her math homework perhaps. At each of the twenty tables bobbed a cluster of blue balloons tied to a small replica of the Titanic, which foundered amid a centerpiece of plastic icebergs the size of teakettles.
The room felt very warm. Howard followed close enough behind that Mirella could feel his breath against her neck. As they passed by a mirrored panel, she could see that he was frowning in the fixed, ironic way peculiar to him; anyone who did not know him well might have imagined he was smiling.
On the drive to Greenwich that morning Howard and Mirella had argued in the car over whether Howard should buy a new computer that could handle the latest architectural design software that was coming out—Howard said he didn’t want a new computer; he didn’t work that way; Mirella said don’t be a Luddite, she was talking about a technology upgrade, not a spiritual compromise, he hadn’t wanted e-mail either, she reminded him, and now look how much he used it—which slid into an argument over whether or not Mirella minded that she made more money than Howard did, an issue he raised because she mentioned their federal tax refund was less than they’d planned on and then had asked when was he getting paid for that kitchen. It all ended in an argument over whether Howard was driving too close to a beige Suburban in front of them, which led to Mirella’s accusation that lately he’d seemed unapproachable.
“You’re so locked up,” she said, standing on Temple Beth El’s white limestone steps, wincing at the unexpected shrillness in her voice.
That was when Howard had turned to look at her, his hands in the pockets of his gray flannel suit, and with a sudden throb of dread, Mirella realized he meant right then to tell her something important. Right in front of Temple Beth El, Howard was gathering himself for a revelation. Which must have been his reason for wanting to leave the children at home.
She wished now that they’d turned around and gotten back in the car, driven a few blocks, and looked for a quiet place to have lunch before the service. It was true, as Randi said, they rarely spent time alone anymore. In the anonymous afternoon clatter of the restaurant, Howard could have told her what he wanted to say—speaking curtly at first, as he always did when he was nervous, fidgeting with his silverware. Then she would try, as she always did, to solve whatever problem he presented to her, which was not the same thing as listening to the problem.
Yet after all, there was really very little he could reveal about himself that she hadn’t already guessed at, worried about, made peace with, even come secretly to value. They had been married almost thirteen years. Over glasses of red wine, because maybe she could allow herself just one, they would gaze at each other across the table. Howard’s forehead would glisten. She would reach out and with her napkin pat where his black hair was thinning. As their meals arrived, fragrant and hot on white china, they would sit back and smile wryly, reflecting that soon enough it would be time to drive home, to the seductions and distractions of the children. But for the moment they had only each other; it was just the two of them. “I love you,” she would say. “I have some news.”
Mirella saw the scene so clearly she almost believed it had happened.
BY THE BOUQUET of yellow roses, Richard introduced Howard and Mirella to a couple of lawyers from his firm who were talking baseball. Affably the lawyers nodded moist faces, raising their glasses of beer. “She’s a big shot,” Richard told them, wagging his thumb at Mirella. “In the paper all the time. Had lunch with the first lady last year.”
“Along with two hundred other people,” Mirella said.
“Fifty,” said Howard.
“Bosom buddies,” Richard insisted to the lawyers. “Next she’ll meet the president and start poking in affairs of state. Hah. Bosom buddy of the president. Poking in affairs of state.”
“Richard.” Mirella watched Howard gaze out over the crowd.
“Seriously,” said Richard. “What’s a smart woman like her doing with a schmuck like him?”
“Is this supposed to be political analysis?” said Mirella, annoyed that she was allowing herself to be provoked, especially by Richard, with whom she’d had this conversation twice in the past year already.
“Ha, ha,” said the younger of the two lawyers.
Richard was wearing a tuxedo. He had put on weight since they’d seen him last in January; his neck folded pinkly over his white shirt collar. He was flushed and distracted, his eyes as luminous as a young girl’s. All four men were wearing silken white yarmulkes held in place with bobby pins. Richard had provided both yarmulkes and bobby pins in two silver-plated bowls by the front entrance before the service. Only Howard’s yarmulke seemed to sit naturally.
But then, whatever Howard undertook was done with a certain grace, Mirella decided, ignoring Richard, who had begun telling a joke about the similarities between the president’s golf game and his appreciation of women. Even the way Howard pointed his toes to pull on his socks in the morning was graceful, or cradled a cup of coffee, or slept with an arm arced over his head. She loved to watch him draw. She’d fallen in love with him the first time she watched him take a sheet of paper and, in a few swift confident gestures, create a house out of nothing. His dexterity seemed deeply subtle to her, and the rigid standards he set for himself were something she always applauded, too enthusiastically perhaps. Long ago she’d realized that Howard’s artistic principles were paired with an odd ineffectuality, a hesitation that seemed rooted in sorrow and loss, and had produced in him a kind of stillness.
Once, soon after they were married, they were walking on Newbury Street after buying bagels for breakfast, looking at the magnolias in bloom. Mirella had just finished fingering a magnolia petal, mentioning that it had the texture of human skin, when Howard began talking about the morning his mother died. His voice had been monotonous as he described the green curtains drawn around her hospital bed; a television laugh track roaring in the next room; the closed, aquatic feeling of the air. He was ten years old. His mother had not looked at him, but held his hand, forgetting or unable to let go, while his father and Richard stood weeping at the end of the bed. Against the white of her pillows, her face had been the color of clay, her nose sharp and pointed at the ceiling. Minutes ticked by, fraught, untenable, weirdly boring. Until finally, Howard had pulled his hand away.
“Do you understand what I did?” he said, confronting Mirella on that scented morning. “She was holding on to me.”
“I understand what you did,” she’d said gently, and tried to put her arms around him. But he marched off down the damp sidewalk, clutching the bag of bagels, and they’d never spoken at length about his mother’s death again. He had been, Mirella gathered, her favorite.
His father died the year Mirella met Howard. From their single encounter, lunch at an Albany steak house, she had a recollection of a cigar, a dark face, a white short-sleeved shirt with buttons straining at the stomach. According to Howard, his father had preferred Richard. Richard played baseball; Richard was newspaper delivery boy of the year; Richard ate everything on his plate. Richard did not draw pencil sketches of the Chrysler building and Chartres on the kitchen baseboards, nor did Richard spend weeks shut up in his room, gluing strips of cardboard into a model of the Bank of England, then burning the imperfect results. Brute competence emanated from Richard’s bluish jaws, along with the musky burlap smell of his aftershave. Which was, perhaps, simply the route sorrow had taken for him.
“Howard,” Richard was saying now. “Howard. Hey, Howard. Listen, come over here, I’ve got some other people for you to meet. See that guy—”
“What guy?” said Howard uneasily.
“That fat guy in pinstripes. See him? He just bought three acres in Martha’s Vineyard to build a summer place and I said, listen, I got this brother, a prize-winning architect—”
Howard sighed and glanced apologetically at the two lawyers. But he depended on Richard to be both a philistine and his champion. And Richard, Mirella thought, watching him grip Howard’s shoulder, which made Howard spill the glass of champagne he’d just accepted from a waiter—for all his genuine brotherly affection and goodwill, for all his pride in Howard’s graduate school prizes, Richard had always, in her opinion, required Howard to be something of a mess.
He’s very green, her own father had said of Howard, after they first met. And once she got over her fear that he was somehow commenting on Howard’s being Jewish, she understood that her father was trying to be insightful and was, in fact, succeeding. Green, her father said. He makes me think of green.
And there was a freshness about Howard, a sense of pliancy, even susceptibility. Howard believed himself to be cynical, but Mirella recognized his cynicism as another kind of youthfulness, a young person’s pretense at accepting fate. When really there was nothing he loved so much as rearranging the future, imagining himself living in a log house in Oregon or in an adobe house in Arizona, always someplace rustic—a restlessness that she had never found threatening because it was paired with his almost obsessive devotion to their own house. In fact, Howard’s yearning was one of the things she most loved about him. It struck her as poetic, essential, part of his maleness, this longing to be somewhere else. Only sometimes lately it seemed a little tiring. Where they were now, after all, seemed challenging enough.
It was very hot. A swell of nausea rocked through her, making her hands tremble. For a few minutes she continued to stand with the lawyers, who began asking her politely about Massachusetts’s community property laws, while Richard made off with Howard, tugging him by the sleeve. Then she excused herself and staggered into the crowd to look for a rest room.
The drooping pianist launched into “Camptown Races.” Mirella had just reached the rest room door when as a dark-haired boy jostled past her, then paused to apologize, giving her a surprisingly adult wink, and suddenly—in the nimble, veering way her moods could shift at a party—she decided that she must have imagined the moment on the temple steps, that Howard had not looked dark and agonized, that Richard was not going to patronize him, that her stomach had settled and it might be possible after all to enjoy the balloons, the roast beef, the plastic icebergs of Danielle’s bas mitzvah. An elderly black man walked by wearing a red fez instead of a yarmulke. From their corner of the room, the yellow roses gave off a fresh and gracious scent, reminding Mirella of summer afternoons on a wide lawn.
When she emerged again from the rest room, she discovered Howard’s sister-in-law, Vivvy, standing near the piano in a tourquoise batik dress, patting at her long, untidy ponytail of gray hair. Feeling cooler now, Mirella went over to kiss her cheek and say congratulations.
Vivvy did not immediately respond; a few years ago she had gone deaf in one ear and Mirella was on the wrong side of her. “Oh,” she said, looking around in consternation. “I thought you were Danielle.”
Danielle was the youngest of Richard and Vivvy’s three daughters. The other two, Hannah and Eden, were in college, both dean’s list, according to Richard.
“She did a great job,” Mirella said. “It was a lovely service.”
Vivvy peered at her. “You thought so? I was afraid it was a bit long.”
Mirella began to repeat that the service was lovely, though it actually had been overly long—Danielle stumbled through her readings with peevish terror, hands fisted on the lectern—when they were interrupted by Danielle’s flute teacher bobbing up in a damp-looking red kimono, her blond hair in a top knot pierced by a lacquered stick. “The darling,” cried the flute teacher. Mirella took a step back to watch Vivvy dispatch the flute teacher, who had begun insisting that Danielle was a born performer. “Really?” said Vivvy, sounding more English than usual, which was her habit when she wanted to be discouraging without being rude. “A natural,” repeated the flute teacher, her high voice trembling.
“Ah, to be natural,” murmured Vivvy, smiling at Mirella.
“So tell me, how are you?” Vivvy demanded when the flute teacher had floundered back into the crowd. She pinched Mirella’s arm, and Mirella felt obliged, as she always did with Vivvy, to admit to something, and so she said she’d had a recent bout of flu.
“But it was over quickly.”
“No vomiting?” asked Vivvy professionally. She had attended medical school before marrying Richard.
“Just a little queasiness.”
“You look pale. Maybe you’re still sick.” Vivvy pretended to knock her knuckles against Mirella’s midriff. “Anybody in there?”
“Oh please,” laughed Mirella, shrinking backward.
“So where are the kiddies? Did you leave them with your mother?”
“They’re with the nanny,” admitted Mirella.
“I thought she vanished.”
“Another one.”
“Mary Poppins?” inquired Vivvy, once again summoning the clipped vowels of Epping Green, which she had left at seven and therefore must hardly remember. Yet she persisted in calling vacations “holidays,” and referring to “fortnights,” and asking Mirella if she wanted a coffee. Sometimes Howard and Mirella imitated her, crying “Wot?” at each other and declaring everything to be “brilliant.” Still, Mirella reflected, of everyone in the family, Vivvy was the most sober in her way, her affectations being obvious, and never interfering with her astute assessment of her own situation, which was that Richard had the soul of a good-humored fishmonger, she had abandoned girlhood ambitions of doctoring coal miners to live amid tennis courts and security systems, and her beloved daughters were embarrassed by her gray ponytail, her refusal to get a nose job, and her tendency to bray into the telephone.
Mirella glanced over to where Howard was now talking with Richard and the man in pinstripes. At that instant Howard laughed, his lean face creasing in a way that made him look handsome and distant. “They’re all Mary Poppins in the beginning,” she said, turning back to face Vivvy. “Aren’t they?”
Behind her, she could hear other people laughing as someone finished telling a story. The room had gotten stuffy again. An elderly lady sailed past in a black beaded dress, smiling furiously, rhinestones blazing across the prow of her chest, a petroleum-smelling perfume trailing in her wake.
“Ah, my charming mother,” observed Vivvy. “Queen of the May.”
Mirella laughed, trying to imagine herself thirty years from now, hoping that she might be similarly awful and glittering and that Pearl would say the same thing about her.
Because the attachment between Vivvy and her mother, though often storming, was one that Mirella had always admired. There was nothing mother and daughter did not perceive about each other or forbear to comment on. They were connoisseurs of each other’s frailties, and their most censorious remarks struck any listener as equally tender and even somehow reverent. Their attachment privately shamed Mirella whenever she compared it to her relationship with her own mother, who demanded little besides small talk during their monthly lunch dates, but expected a stream of sentimental gestures—flowers on anniversaries, thank-you notes, holiday invitations to tea. If Mirella forgot one of these occasions, her mother’s expression would be strenuously wistful the next time they saw each other; she would pick at her salad, sigh heavily, refuse to admit that anything was wrong, until Mirella deciphered what had happened and apologized.
For a moment she pictured her parents’ narrow brick house on Mount Vernon Street, her mother’s shade garden with its curving path of crushed shells, her father folded like a bat in his wheelchair.
“Can you believe this Titanic business?” Vivvy rolled her eyes. “That Danielle,” she said, trying to sound disapproving. “She may not be a natural but she’s certainly a force of nature.”
“Danielle’s a lovely girl,” said Mirella.
“And how’s Jacob doing?” Vivvy said, after a minute. “Everything all right with him?”
“He’s fine,” said Mirella.
“Talking yet?”
“He’s getting there.”
“Brilliant.” Then Vivvy repeated what everyone repeated to Mirella and Howard, about Einstein not speaking until he was five.
The laughter behind them grew louder. People were beginning to find their place cards, preparing to sit down. Mirella shrugged, feeling hot again and disquieted the way she always felt whenever people began asking about Jacob. Inevitably their questions struck her as pointed, as if they had information about him that she did not. How’s Jacob doing? the mothers at Pearl’s school were forever murmuring, faces poised for sympathy. Why are you so interested? she always wanted to answer, and always stopped herself.
Jacob’s face suddenly appeared before her, small, strained, his birthmark standing out like a tiny stop sign. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Vivvy meant well, of course.
Vivvy was talking now about the caterer, about the floating island, which might not survive the heat. Perhaps, Mirella thought, she could slip outside for a breath of air, sit for a minute in the car. She would like to use her cell phone to call home, make sure Jacob was taking his nap and that Randi knew Pearl needed a bath tonight. Maybe Howard would come with her. But when Mirella glanced around again to find Howard, he was gone, swallowed up by the crowd as if he’d never been there at all.