Jennifer is twenty-eight and I am thirty-three. Our son is sick. The year is 1993. He has a few days of life left in him, but we do not yet know this. I have taken the first flight to Boston and then a ferry. A car is waiting for me in Provincetown harbour. I have been holding my sick son in a room in the clapboard house in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, for five hours. It is late afternoon and Jennifer suggests I get some fresh air in the garden. I am lying under a cherry tree in the garden of the house in Cape Cod. In the garden next door is a woman, maybe twenty-six. She is playing her cello on the wooden deck. The same piece of music over and over again. It is a pleasure to listen to her attempt to learn the language of that music. It is humming with life and hope. The woman looks up from her giant instrument, the bow in her hand, her back very straight and poised, and sees me lying under the tree. I wave, a very limp wave. I tell her I’m going to swim in the bay. The tide is in. Does she want to swim with me?
Yes, she does. She does want to swim with me. She stands up, her hand lightly resting on her cello, which looks lonely from the sudden absence of her body.
I wait for her to appear again, not believing she will come back, but she does. Her copper hair is shining in the sun, her green eyes are glittering, she seems to be phosphorescent, like a firefly or moss that can glow in the darkness of the night. I am delirious with exhaustion and I am frightened. No one seems to know what is wrong with my son. She walks through the hedge that has an arch carved into it, and when she enters our part of the garden, she stops and flinches. I turn around to where she is looking. Jennifer is standing behind me under the cherry tree. A wind is up. The blossom falls like pink rain.
‘Yes,’ older Jennifer said. ‘I watched you both head off to the bay.’
‘I was out of my mind,’ I whispered from my bed in the Euston Road.
The phosphorescent, copper-haired woman took my hand and we waded into the shallow bay with its little crabs and floating weeds. She was telling me all about herself. I said nothing at all. I was pleased not to talk about my sick son. She was on vacation and renting the house next door. She was reading literature at Harvard and she played her cello in an orchestra. Her main task that summer was to learn the music I had heard her practising in the garden. In a few weeks’ time she would be playing in a concert in Boston. She was open-minded and interesting and appreciated the attention and the company of the man who was listening to her. He had all the time in the world to be with her, it seemed, to swim and collect shells and frolic in the warm shallow water. The sun shone on her bright copper hair. We lay on our stomachs in the water, our shoulders touching, looking out at the sand slopes and white reeds and families unpacking picnics. It was as if she were a demonic python with her glittering eyes and long tanned legs, her soft hands deceptively strong, reaching out to me under the big American sky. She had just arrived in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, and knew nothing about my son, Isaac, who was unwell and would not survive, though I did not know that then. I liked it that she lived in another sort of reality, of books and music and the first few days of a vacation and a concert to look forward to in the future.
It was so different from my own reality, because soon, very soon, we would be performing the rituals of our son’s death.
‘No,’ older Jennifer said, sitting by my side, ‘no, she was not the python, don’t make her the thing that you were. You were the snake in the reeds. You walked away when I most needed you.’
‘You were anti-need,’ I said coldly. ‘That was your thing, you didn’t need me.’
‘There was no point in depending on you.’ She pulled her hand away from mine. ‘You were anti-dependency right from the start.’
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: that is why you were attracted to me in the first place.’
Jennifer flicked a strand of her silver hair over her shoulder. In the dark I could see her beauty, her poise and grace.
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: I had a baby when I was twenty-four. Isaac was with me every day while I worked. We were happy. We loved each other. Many other people loved him too. He died in my arms and you were ten minutes away, but you were not there.’
Her phone was beeping. ‘Don’t take that call’: I was steely now. ‘We are just beginning. We are on to something interesting.’
I snatched the beeping phone from her hand.
‘You took our son to America.’ I was shouting again.
She stood up and started to walk away. The door was open and I could see her making her way through the long, eerie corridor towards the exit. Her heels clattered across the floor. ‘You more or less kidnapped my son,’ I shouted through the door. ‘We should be together, you know we should.’
Jennifer kept on walking.
‘We are attached.’ I was surprised at the volume of my voice.
She turned around and suddenly ran back towards me with such force and purpose I was terrified.
‘You,’ she said, ‘know nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing about me and nothing about you.’
She was sobbing as she leaned forward and slapped my hand until her phone fell to the floor. When she stooped down to pick it up, I knew in the moment of drifting off, which I often do when things get overwhelming, that Wolfgang had paid for my private room. It was something to do with the phone.
Rainer appeared from wherever he lived in the walls of the hospital. He pulled Jennifer away from my bed and walked her out of my world. She was speaking on the phone in the eerie light of the corridor. I heard her bracelets jangling on her arm as she spoke. She sounded like she was speaking to a teenage child.
‘If you’ve lost your bank card, you need to go to the bank with your passport and draw out some cash.’
After I had frolicked in the bay with the copper-haired woman, she told me about the music she was learning for her concert. It turned out to be a Scottish folk song. She was practising Nina Simone’s version of that song to accompany the pianist on her cello. She sang it to me on the way back through the reeds. The first line was ‘Black is the colour of my true love’s hair.’ That day, when I betrayed Jennifer under the cherry tree, I had discovered a terrible cruelty within myself. I glanced at her leaning against the wall in the corridor, her bracelets glittering on her arm.
‘No, don’t do that,’ Jennifer said quietly into her phone. ‘Ask your father to give you some money until you sort it out.’