My parents sit apart in the middle of the living room. Between them, one low seat awaits me. My mother’s chest and mine bear a pin of torn black ribbon, symbol of heartbreak. But Nana and my father have done it the old-fashioned way. The lapel of Nana’s impeccably tailored jacket is ripped, expressing, I suspect, not only deference to tradition but fury. My father’s white dress shirt is conspicuously gashed.
The air is redolent with perfume, tuna fish, and boiled coffee, while visitors swarm about us, talking to each other in the hushed, excited manner that premature death invites.
When he still lived with us, my father was pedantic about closing the curtains as night fell, although, since we saw no houses beyond the garden, presumably no one was watching. One of my mother’s pleasures is to keep the curtains open through the night. I am distracted by the windows’ twilight reflection—masses of people in the choreography of a party.
The long buffet near the kitchen holds ziggurats of food. A communal busybody with pleated cheeks asks me officiously if I would like her to make me a plate.
“Can’t eat,” I say, and look around to catch Tam’s eye.
The sonorous voice I have been trying to quell makes its callous declaration: You will not speak to her again.
All those who approach loom over me. I greet their knees, subduing my panic, an inversion of the times my parents allowed us to mingle with the company for the cocktail hour.
My mother’s oldest friend, Marly, steps even closer. “Sweetie, you look exactly the same. I can see you, toddling after Tam. Eve the rebel,” she says to her husband in an indulgent non sequitur.
No wonder Nell went to New York and married in a weekend, I think mutinously.
“Tam never had an angry word for anyone,” Marly continues, her face crumpling. “She was so good. And she loved you more than words can say.”
Marly’s hackneyed paean to my sister is superimposed on Tam’s own words as our fight unfurls.
“You want it as much as I did,” Tam said. “You just don’t know how to work for it.”
She was lying in the hospital bed, looking up at me.
“Tam,” I protested. “I love my life.”
“What life? Teaching obscure women about obscure women? You’re in love with the past,” she accused me. “What about Simon?”
“He’s in the present,” I countered.
“It’s pathetic. You’re jealous of me,” she said suddenly.
I looked at my sister, her body emaciated and bloated, her destiny written on her skin.
Pity felt worse than rage. “I work hard, too,” I ventured.
“I’ve always believed in you,” Tam said. “But you’re still teaching night school.”
“Continuing education.”
“You keep saying you’ll move on, but you don’t.”
“Such a wonderful mother,” Marly intones. “I loved watching her with Ella and little Gabe. Oh”—she cries out—“how will we manage?”
While I try to speak, Marly’s voice does what I cannot do and breaches my mother’s grief. At last she reaches out to me.
Immediately, I want to crawl into her arms as I did when I was little, wrap myself in her scent and amplitude. Until this moment, her arms have hung slack at her sides; she has worn the same dress for two days and no perfume for the first time in my memory.
One of Tam’s gifts, inherited from our mother, was her embrace. For a methodical, conscientious sort, Tam had an exuberant hug, a homecoming in itself. I basked in that hug at airports and outside trains. Now my skin needs touch as an animal craving, instinctive, essential. But I cannot curl into my mother. Many people have come to see us, and I’m meant to welcome them with dry-eyed dignity.
“Eve,” my mother proffers in a whisper. “You might do something with your hair.”
I am stupefied.
“It’s just—” She looks around for help; none is forthcoming. “You’re allowed to,” she explains. “Your father once told me that an unmarried woman can even wear makeup during shiva.”
I can tell that I’m gaping at her.
“Don’t look so wild,” she says.
If Tam were here, she and I would be snorting vulgarly. “Can you believe Mummy?” she’d complain. “Trying to find you a husband on the day of my funeral.”
A gnarled old man, renowned for his appearance at weddings and funerals to cadge a meal, materializes before me, mumbles the requisite solemnities, and heads for the food.
“Maybe he’s the one,” I say to my mother.
My mother and I were standing side by side before the mirror in the lounge of the East Side restaurant she preferred, while Simon stayed at our table, choosing the wine. It would be their first meeting, and I was not optimistic. For my mother, the eros of reading was a personal affront, as if my riveted gaze were a pronouncement to the world that she was not sufficient. Syntax and meter, the furnishings of Simon’s professional dominion, did not tempt her.
“To be honest,” she began.
“He’s spectacular?” I said. Nothing positive has been known to follow this introductory phrase.
“He’s so—”
I fortified myself.
“—unattractive,” said my mother.
What I was not able to parse for my mother is that a man’s most seductive organ is his brain. When Simon starts to talk, I’m entranced. His speech is like a fingerprint: the unique pattern of him. From his mobile mouth, Simon releases effortlessly words like “withering” or “sibilant.”
“Say anything to me,” I’ll goad him. “Say something banal.”
He laughs, and that’s another winning aspect of Simon. His finding me funny is so much more valuable than beauty.
Simon is slight—make that scrawny—with black eyes and the pallor of someone who spends most of his life in a library or basement. He looks like Franz Kafka on a bad day. To quote him, “I’m a poster boy for the kind of Jew Hitler couldn’t wait to exterminate.”
Occasionally, I’ll interrogate him about how much he must have suffered in his public school, where I know from British memoirs that rugby was the currency and being Jewish and intellectual a near-fatal combination.
But Simon loved school. He was such an obvious genius that everyone left him alone. As a result, he is a more subtle type of insufferable. Simon’s view of himself is an accurate estimation of his strengths.
“Why don’t you begin with the assumption that I’m right?” he once asked me.
“Why would you want to be with a woman who thinks you’re always right?”
Which rendered him wordless, for once.
Simon’s mind works in such an oblique way that I cannot anticipate him. Long ago, Tam and I distinguished between men who are interesting and men with interests: Is there anything worse than hearing someone drone on about opera or golf or the minutiae of his fixations?
Simon has infinite obsessions, but no need to share them. If I’m in an elevator with him, he might say, “That’s the worst Schubert I’ve heard in a decade.”
Then, of course, I have to know which Schubert he heard ten years ago. Being Simon, he can tell me.