ONE EVENING IN MAY my father stepped through our front door bearing a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. He was dressed in a tie and tweed sport coat, and seemed as nervous as a schoolboy.
“So,” he said carefully, “how are you?”
“I’m all right.”
“You look all right.”
We nodded at each other, then away. He came forward, still holding the flowers, letting his eyes roam the living room, taking in the books on the shelves (Horses? I could almost hear him thinking; horses are so East Side), the stacks of multidisk opera CDs, the costly leather chair. Signposts, I assumed, ways of reading this new life of mine. He’d never been here before, never met the woman I now lived with. In fact, these past months I’d hardly seen him.
“Laura’s just getting out of the shower,” I said. “Can I get you something to drink? A glass of wine?”
But he was too absorbed in what he was seeing to hear me. He was standing close to the CDs; something there had caught his attention. I followed his fixed gaze to the top of one of the stacks and a cover photograph of a striking, dark-haired woman.
“She came to the Met,” he murmured.
“Who did?”
“Callas,” he said more firmly, without looking at me, still lost in his own world. “December ‘56, Lucia di Lammermoor. She already owned opera then. You can’t imagine the sound of that voice at its best. A voice that could stop time. I waited hours in line just for standing room. Beside me in the stall that night was a woman about my own age. Magnificent. Dark hair, huge dark eyes. I told her she looked like La Divina herself. The performance hadn’t started yet. We were packed into standing room like cattle, right next to each other, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day. Looked down her nose at me, with that haughty eye of the Jewish princess saving herself for better things. I recognized that look, all right. My God, though, was she something! Still, it wasn’t just anybody singing that night. It was Callas. And when the music started, I forgot all about that woman next to me. Callas sang the first aria. And soon people, grown men and women I’m telling you, people were crying at the beauty of it. Tears were rolling down faces. Underneath the music you could hear the weeping like a dirge. Like being sung to by a voice too beautiful to be human or real. Then she finished, Callas finished, just the first aria, and there was a pause like a single cumulative breath, a pulse, and then the audience—three thousand men and women, the rich sitting, the middle class standing, the poor at home listening on their radios—the audience couldn’t contain itself. Oh, it was bedlam, total goddamn rapture. And the woman next to me, that cool beauty next to me, your mother, she was weeping too, and she took my hand. Just reached out and grabbed it. Because of the music. Because of that voice. It was the greatest moment of my life.”
My father looked up and found me staring at him.
I stood there, wanting to know where that man had gone. The man who was the first to applaud after a performance, who wept at the sound of the human voice, who knew his desires, who wasn’t afraid of being noticed. A man who was visible, in weakness and in strength. A man to pity and yet to admire, who’d risked and lost but who at least had wanted, a wounded veteran of love. Where had he been while I’d been growing up? As though, like a miser, he’d hoarded all the best for himself.
From the back of the apartment Laura’s footsteps sounded against the bare hardwood floor. We turned just as she was entering the room.
I cleared my throat. “Dad, this is Laura Goodman. Laura, my father, Arthur Rose.”
She came forward smiling, her short hair still wet from the shower, slicked back from her face. Her dress the same soft gray as her eyes, falling just below her knees. A single strand of pearls around her neck, their unadorned radiance amplifying her smile and her good intentions, which she presented to him now with innate grace, crossing the room and kissing him on his cheek, welcoming him.
“We wanted to get everything in order first,” she told him, “before we had you over.”
Her warmth worked on both of us, plucked us from the heavy grip of the past with nimble feminine fingers; she raised us up. I felt it happen. And watched him rise to the occasion too, my father, shedding the losses at least for the moment, blushing and smiling and saying that he was happy just to be here at all. Her charm the magic elixir we’d so badly needed—suddenly he was some goofy kid, not the tired man who’d spent his life editing college-level textbooks on behavioral anthropology, the Great War, the rise and fall of ancient Greece.
He remembered the chrysanthemums. “These are for you.”
“Thank you, Arthur. They’re beautiful.”
The flowers she arranged in her grandmother’s Tiffany vase while I poured the wine. Then a tour of the apartment, though it wasn’t big and not much touring was needed. I stayed in the kitchen, putting olives into a bowl, breathing in the smell of Laura’s roast leg of lamb (her mother’s recipe), polenta, cherry tomatoes sautéed in butter. No meal like this had ever been cooked in my studio on West Ninety-seventh. They were in the bedroom now, she and he, the sound of the closet door opening, her ironically concise architectural description (“Closet”), then footsteps again and her sweet voice: “I wish we had two bathrooms but we don’t.”
“You can borrow one of mine,” replied Arthur Rose a bit giddily, “I can’t seem to use them both.”
Laura laughed generously at this odd little joke. And out in the kitchen, relieved and happy and almost unrecognizable to myself, so did I.
After dinner, Laura remained behind to start cleaning up as I walked my father down the long hallway to the elevator. Already my mood was descending from the high of the meal in ways I couldn’t put my finger on. His too, perhaps. We were alone again. The bright green carpet, the uniform lighting that would never be quite right—one of those buildings that are killing the souls of our great cities, block by block. Doors and doors to either side as we walked; and through many of them, and louder than you might imagine, came the boxed vibrations of televised voices, canned laughter, screeching cars and shattering windows. Such hilarity and drama as to make our actual lives seem absurdly small if we weren’t careful.
We reached the elevator, and I pushed the call button.
In a voice of carefully restrained optimism he asked, “Do you think she might be the one, Julian?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
Like a Greek chorus on acid, the dissonant voices continued to reach us through the neighbors’ closed doors. There was no sign of the elevator, and I jabbed the call button with my finger. He waited a few moments before broaching the subject again.
“You want her to be, though, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t have moved in with her if I didn’t.”
He nodded. Thoughtfully, he ran his hands over the sleeves of his tweed jacket; I could see him thinking. He seemed suddenly restless, perhaps reliving the dinner and envisioning my future: Laura’s graceful manners, the kiss she’d given him, the delicious food she’d made.
Suddenly his hands went still, he let them drop to his sides. They were a reader’s hands, an editor’s, the nails bitten down, a smudge of blue ink on the left thumb and another on the ring finger. His gold wedding band still there, the last shining emblem of all the hope he’d ever had for himself.
He cleared his throat. “A nice apartment,” he said. He nodded vaguely while staring at his feet. “A home.”
A comforting verdict for us both; but a melancholy expression had taken hold of his face. Without knowing why, I felt certain he was thinking about my mother.
Just then, far down the elevator shaft, I detected the first sounds of the approaching car.
“All her books,” he murmured to his feet. “Her records, hats, her umbrellas….” He shook his head in helpless denial. “How could she have left so much behind? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Dad, don’t.”
He looked up. His pale eyes still locked and blurred on some distant point, which was the inscrutable heart of another human being. He couldn’t understand how his love had failed to keep her. Spurred by an impulse, I reached out and took his hand. At my touch his eyes appeared to regain focus, and with the effort his stubborn memory released him back to this place and time, and to me.
The elevator arrived. I kissed him on his cheek, held on an extra moment or two, let him go. Then he stepped into the brightly lit box and the doors closed over him.
She was in the bathroom, out of my sight. The door open, the tap running, the sound of falling water broken intermittently by her hands, which scooped and splashed.
In the next room I sat on the edge of the bed, holding a shoe. The other shoe was still on my foot. She was saying something, but because of the water all I could decipher was the vague murmuring of her naturally quiet voice. Then the water shut off, and she emerged wearing a white robe, drying her face with a towel.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked lightly.
I told her no.
“Did tonight feel different from the other times you’ve introduced your girlfriends to your father? Or the same?”
“There haven’t been any other times.”
A look of sober incredulity crossed her face. But it was the truth: I’d never introduced Claire to my father; and none of the others had mattered enough. I bent down to untie my shoe.
Passing in front of me, the lemon verbena scent of her French soap wafting behind her, Laura went to her side of the bed and from under her pillow pulled out the white cotton nightgown that she’d folded and placed there that morning. With her back toward me, she let the robe fall on the bed. Her pristine nakedness freshened the room like a flower, and I sat up. Then with a swift practiced motion, she slipped the nightgown over her head and covered herself.
I had the second shoe off. Getting up, I set the pair together on the floor against the wall, for tomorrow.
“Weren’t you ever in love?”
I turned around. Laura was looking at me with an intense vulnerability that I’d never seen in her before and that erased in one glimpse whatever lightness of tone the conversation had begun with.
This was new territory for us. We were both private people, a couple who’d arrived at living together by way of fewer promises than most, and fewer probing questions too.
“Once,” I said.
“When would that have been?”
“When I was at Harvard.”
“What was her name?”
I didn’t answer right away, and Laura’s penetrating eyes never left my face.
“Her name was Claire Marvel,” I said.
A single, slow nod, as if the name itself had some significance for her.
“What did she look like?”
I shook my head.
“Was she beautiful?”
“Yes.”
“How long were you together?”
“Not long. For most of it we were friends.”
“But you loved her.”
I paused. “Yes. I loved her.”
“How did it end? Assuming it ended.”
“It ended, Laura. She married somebody else.”
“Are you still in love with her?”
“How can you even ask that question?”
Her voice hardened. “Are you still in love with her, Julian?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
Moments passed. Laura dropped her eyes. Then, as though winded, she sat heavily on the bed.
In a drained voice, her hand aimlessly smoothing the duvet, she said, “I guess I’m going to have to think about this.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” I said. “I’m with you now. We’re together.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, Julian. It’s full of good intentions. But I guess I’m not really sure that’s what I heard in your voice.”
She got under the duvet. She turned on her side, away from me, and brought her knees up until the shape of her body beneath the covers was a small, hardly noticeable thing, no bigger than a girl’s.
She closed her eyes. “Would you turn out the light?”
I did as she asked; the light went out. And I stood blinking, almost panicked. In the boundless dark the room no longer seemed familiar. I could not even find her.
“Laura.”
She didn’t answer.
“Laura, I love you.”
I waited but there was no answer. Just her silence like a long, slow drop. She was breathing there but I couldn’t hear her; she was listening. I felt close to tears, and I groped through the darkness for the door.
A sound stopped me: her hand lifting the bedcovers. Then her whispered voice:
“Darling, come to bed.”
In the middle of the night, lying sleepless beside her, I had a vision.
It was a vision of beginnings and endings; a gossamer net of intertwined hopes cast so wide that it held worlds, and in those worlds was my own.
A vision of what would come to pass, up to a point.
On a crisp blue day in autumn, on a bench by the dog run in Riverside Park, I would ask Laura to marry me. And she would say yes.
On a warm clear day the following spring, on the lawn behind her parents’ house in Westchester, with my father acting as my best man, under a chuppah as round as the sun, I would break a glass and we would be married.
Afterward I kiss my wife, whose smile this day has a wattage that is entirely new to me; literally, she glows. I kiss her again. And later, after the cutting of the cake and the start of the dancing, as with some difficulty I am explaining to her appalled great-aunt on her mother’s side that, in fact, I have never visited Israel or set foot on a kibbutz, Laura appears. “Excuse me, I need him for a minute,” she says, and whisks me away, out through the side of the enormous white tent, across the lawn, past the swimming pool, into the house and up the stairs and along the hall to the corner bedroom that has always been hers.
The door closes behind us; for the first time we are alone together as husband and wife. And I am aware that whatever she might have done as a child, she did in here; whatever she might have thought, she thought in here. My wife. I don’t know what this private history means or what consequences it will bring, but suddenly I feel the immense unimagined weight of it and how, today, it has been entrusted to me for the rest of our lives.
“I wanted to see this with you,” Laura says, and leads me to the window.
There below us is the tent. Its flaps are tied open and we can hear the music flowing out of it, can see into the luminous interior where all the people of our shared lives are dancing to a mediocre wedding band, our friends and family holding each other, embracing, murmuring into each other’s ears, telling jokes, laughing, raising glasses, celebrating us even though, for the moment, we are not among them. And watching, I smile. It is beautiful and innocent and generous and kind and above all hopeful and before this scene Laura and I are like two momentary angels, given this rare chance to witness our own good fortune on earth.
Among the guests is David Glassman, by now three inches taller and a freshman at Swarthmore. A little less shy, it appears, a bit more grown into himself—at one point he’s even spotted taking a turn on the dance floor to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” ….
Then the vision tilts slightly, time regains itself; it is long before all this, it is only next month, and David is graduating from the Cochrane School. With a knot of pride in my chest I watch him receive his diploma, and the prize for Most Distinguished Long Essay. I applaud as loudly as any uncle when his name is called. And afterward at the reception, when he brings his parents, who are barely on speaking terms, over to meet me, I shake their hands and tell them what a son they have here, a smart, good son, and how privileged I feel to have been allowed to teach him. My throat seizes up with feeling, and for a moment I am too moved to speak….
Then the vision tilts again—it’s just a vision after all, it’s not life—and the reception is over, the echoing hall is empty, everyone has gone. But the feeling remains, such hope mingled with such sadness, a fragile net of all desires past and present….
I was tired then, and finally I slept.