Julian’s presence chased away the grim hush that hung over the dinner table. Only Paul felt any discomfort now. Even Audrey—who didn’t think much of Julian—occasionally smirked into the back of her hand at one of his jokes. And he had won Laurie and his mother over so completely that it was hard for Paul to remember how guarded they usually were around outsiders. Julian wasn’t a worried aunt or a prying, tutting neighbor; he was a blank slate, easy to talk to, endlessly interested in what they had to say but never too curious. He patiently absorbed Laurie’s questions about France and her fondly cynical gossip about her friends. One day he surprised her with a few of his Dalida and Françoise Hardy LPs, and Paul knew right away he would conveniently forget to ask her to return them. At first Paul’s mother was nearly as quiet as when the family sat alone, but she observed Julian attentively, and occasionally even smiled. When he asked a few questions about the Bobby Kennedy biography she was reading, she picked it up the next day for the first time in months, as if she wanted to have more to tell him next time she saw him.
To Paul’s mother, Julian must seem less a human being than a miraculous apparition. Here at long last was a friend for her only son, one who could match all Paul’s intelligence but who showed none of the awkwardness or fragility that accompanied it in Paul. He was respectful and charming, sophisticated but deliberately uncondescending; when a siren screamed past the nearest intersection, he didn’t cringe and cover his ears like a child. She welcomed Julian with a shy, decisive warmth that made Paul feel almost as though something was being stolen from him.
Even before his father’s death, Paul would have been embarrassed for Julian to know her—her wringing anxious hands, her flowery homemade blouses, the way she sometimes talked with a mouthful of peanut-butter-and-sweet-pickle sandwich tucked into her cheek. But now she was just a sorry blot of gray, so far from Julian’s own energy and searing color that it was hard to believe he could even pity her. Whenever Julian spoke to her, Paul felt such a sick wave of humiliation that he could barely stand to look at either of them. And yet Julian seemed to seek her out, engaging her even when there was no need for him to acknowledge her at all. When Paul tried to slip straight out after greeting him at the door, Julian always leaned around his shoulder and called “Hi, Mrs. Fleischer!” into the entryway. More often than not that reeled her in, and the two of them would cycle through ten minutes of the same small talk they had the last time. Paul could do nothing but silently wait them out, one hand on the doorknob, army jacket zipped to the chin.
“I’m sorry she was still in her nightgown,” he told Julian once, when they finally managed to depart for their weekly visit to the art-house theater. “She’s so lazy sometimes, I hate it, I wish she’d—”
“She’s sweet to me, Pablo,” said Julian flatly. The defensive edge to his voice somehow made Paul remember that Julian wasn’t actually any older than he was.
Paul tried to grow accustomed to the visits. He tried to enjoy this other version of Julian, if only for the flashes of humor and wry grace that managed to break through the false earnestness. He tried to think of the dinner-table chatter as a reprieve from his father’s absence instead of an affront to it. Still he caught himself resenting this half-familiar boy at his side, making his little sister laugh and his mother smile, talking through the silence as if he didn’t know or care that it was there at all. Paul knew he was unsuited to this place he’d claimed, no matter how easily he made himself fit.
Paul’s grandparents made a point of whisking him and his sisters out of the house on Sundays. The custom had begun not long after the shiva, back when it was ostensibly intended to allow Paul’s mother a few quiet hours to give widowhood her undivided attention. Nowadays, as their daughter made it clear nothing else would ever hold her attention again, his grandparents seemed to make the overture more toward the Fleischer children themselves—a chance, however brief, to pretend nothing had changed at all.
It was such a beloved reprieve for them that even Audrey still participated. At their grandparents’ house, all the unnatural seriousness would leave her. Paul liked Audrey better there, where she laughed as loudly as she wanted and told outrageous stories about her musician friends. She wasn’t back to normal—none of them were—but it was enough of an improvement that they always dreaded having to go home again.
Sunday’s entertainments were never elaborate. Lunch was usually Shabbat leftovers and oddments from the freezer; as far as Paul could tell, his grandparents’ music collection was comprised of the same thirty jazz standards, recorded in slightly different orders and styles. But the very monotony was soothing in a way that few things in his world managed to be.
Nothing ever changed at his grandparents’ house. The two of them scarcely even seemed to age, and had remained robust well into their sixties. His grandmother was a restless hummingbird of a woman, shorter even than his mother, with a cloud of steel-gray hair and a rapid Brooklyn patois. His grandfather was her opposite, tall and somber-faced; he carried himself with the lumbering deliberation of a draft horse. They liked to tell the story of their first meeting in the back of a police van in the twenties—a pair of restless idealists pouring their lives into labor activism. But in their old age they shared an idyllic stasis. They filled in each other’s gaps so thoroughly that it felt inconceivable that they could exist separately; at lunch they always sat elbow-to-elbow, speaking in overlap and borrowing freely from each other’s plates. Paul believed in his own death far more conclusively than he believed in theirs. He knew it must have occurred to them that one day the stasis would have to end—that one would have to go before the other, that the wallpaper would be torn down and the house sold, Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman divided between their daughters’ basements. But they gave no indication that they believed in endings at all, for themselves or for anything outside of them, and that was nearly enough to forget he believed, either. He remembered his parents bringing them here during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The house had had the same effect then—it could dull a cataclysm into background noise.
“. . . not as if I didn’t think he had it coming.” Paul was only half listening to Audrey’s story. “But all I’m saying, you can’t kick a chair out from under some drunk yutz and claim that’s a ‘revolutionary action against the bourgeoisie.’”
“Never heard that one before,” said Paul’s grandmother as she brought her teacup to her lips. She exchanged a wry look with his grandfather, who raised his eyebrows and said nothing. “I thought your generation wanted to liberate the proletariat through peace and love?”
“No one I’d hang out with,” said Audrey airily. “I have no patience for that self-righteous do-nothing flower power bullshit—sorry, Bubbe.”
“Such language, Audrey,” said his grandmother, unfazed. “You’ll burn your Zayde’s ears.”
Paul let his attention fade again. His family allowed him to be quiet, which was a rare mercy, especially now. While the others picked at the crumbs of their meal, Paul worked aimlessly in his sketchbook. He was trying to plot out a painting—he had the image in his head of a human figure overtaken by flora, the torso erupting with ferns and wildflowers. But whenever he started in on the details, he decided he didn’t like the composition. He sketched and erased until the paper was ragged, but he couldn’t seem to force himself to give up and turn the page.