Christmas in Austin Page 10

  “Whatever. You can do whatever people are doing.”

  “But can I watch?”

  “Okay,” and the boy ran to pick up the ball and then walked back to put it in his father’s hand—looking up for the first time into his face. Cal had blue eyes, like Jean, like his mother. “Okay,” Paul said again, “Thank you,” and the kid took off, rounded the corner of the playhouse and was gone. Paul said to Willy, “You can go, too, if you want,” but Willy wanted to keep playing, so for the next half hour that’s what they did. Paul, holding the ball underneath, by the palm, tossed it lightly at Willy, who knocked it away, and every four balls (that’s how many came in the can), uncle and nephew ran to chase them down and start again. Willy was pretty good, he had a good eye, and swung naturally along the line of his hip, not up and down but horizontal, which gave him a reasonable chance of making decent contact. Neither one of them spoke much. Willy was concentrating; Paul was rehearsing in his mind various arguments against Dana. If the kid misses me so much he’s got a funny way of showing it. The way he gets cooped up in that apartment all day in New York, I mean, no wonder. The only thing he knows how to do is watch TV. And so on—but without much conviction.

  *

  Jean sat in Liesel’s study at her computer—she could see Cal running back into the house, on his own. He ran like his father, vaguely knock-kneed, but powerfully, too, as if he might stop or change direction at every step. His heels kicked out behind him, he seemed to be running downhill, and she could feel some of the kid-pleasure in being fast, in having the energy to get where you wanted to go as quickly as possible, and then he disappeared up the back steps into the kitchen. From inside the house, faintly, she heard the slam of the door and waited to see if Paul would follow. But sunshine fell on the empty lawn, the switched-off fountain, the bare trees, and the mesh of the screen window gave a faint impression of something etched and printed in its frame, a picture of a winter garden. Dust in the air of her mother’s study moved slowly through the green light of her computer as she shifted her attention.

  *

  Paul didn’t want to spend his afternoon teaching his sister’s son how to play tennis. He stuck it out for a reasonable time, and then he said to Willy, “I need to take a shower, should we call it a day?” But Willy by this point had learned to hit the ball two or three or sometimes four times in a row by himself against the concrete wall and wanted to keep going. So Paul left him there like that, bouncing the ball, hitting it, waiting for it to bounce back and hitting it again and mostly losing it in the weeds that grew up at the edge of the court. Running after the ball and starting over.

  Dana was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the New York Times and drinking coffee, when Paul walked in the backdoor. “How was Lance?” she asked him, and he stared at her for a second before replying.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you went out biking with him. That’s what Jean said.”

  It was the kind of question she might have asked Nathan, friendly and interested. He thought, I guess she’s doing her best. But this is also what her best looked like, a bit polite.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “He talks a lot.”

  “And he’s boring or what?”

  Maybe she wasn’t being polite—maybe this was just another kind of dig. So this is who you spend your time with, famous people. Instead of me and your son.

  “It’s not just that, it’s that you have to let him talk. Because he’s Lance. Whereas …” He was trying to explain himself, he wanted to explain himself to her. “Everybody else … There’s a hierarchy, which everybody accepts. But Lance is okay, it’s not his fault. He’s very competitive.”

  “I thought you wanted to get away from all that.”

  “I wanted to get away from all that,” Paul said. “Where’s Cal?”

  “I don’t know. He was watching TV with Ben. And then Susie came in and turned it off. So they’ve gone away somewhere.”

  She sat with her legs crossed, at an angle to the table, because her knees wouldn’t fit underneath it. Her skirt was long and high-waisted, but he could see her fresh-shaved ankles and the straps of her leather sandals—she had a dancer’s muscular feet. The newspaper lay scattered over the stained oak.

  “Where’s Susie?”

  She looked at him, smiling, and shrugged. She was thinking, when Susie wants to turn off the TV, she turns it off. I’m a guest in this house. But Paul didn’t seem to understand.

  “Where’s Liesel?” he asked.

  “Taking a nap, I think. On the living-room floor.”

  “Where’s Jean?”

  “She said she was going to call Nathan. Anything else?”

  “I’ll go see what Cal is up to. And maybe take a shower.”

  He stood in the doorway still, with the screen door closed behind him; but now he shut the housedoor, too, and felt somehow that he had to lower his head, to duck his gaze, just to get out of the room. Still in his biking shoes, he clicked across the wooden kitchen floor, and Dana had a flash of feeling, watching his back, that maybe he really was a pretty odd guy—in his Lycra shorts and shirt, thirty-five years old, too skinny, with his strong and hairy legs, and slightly saddle-sore way of walking. Not unlikable or anything, but the sort of guy who confessed things to you in a way you didn’t totally trust. It was like the thought you get on a subway platform, that maybe you should jump. Maybe this is what he’s like.

  *

  The bathroom was upstairs, but Paul sat down on the lower steps first and took off his shoes, which he left in the entrance hall, where his backpack was. It had a change of clothes and he picked it up. Quietly, then, he poked his head around the living-room door.

  As children, they were never allowed to go in—the living room was off-limits, except on special occasions, like Christmas. After dinner parties (which they didn’t have often), Bill and Liesel would bring their guests back here and sit around the coffee table (covered in a sequined Indian fabric) and eat crème de marrons with whipped cream. An old backgammon set, never played on, served as coaster or ornament. The lamp hanging over the coffee table was Art Nouveau, the light inside seemed always twilit, even in the middle of the day. Three tall windows looked darkly out on the bright front yard, shaded still more by the screen porch. Paul felt, entering, something like his old childish sense of a world of adult privilege, secrets and appetites and conversations, from which he was excluded.

  His mother lay on the carpet outside her study, on her back, very straight with her arms beside her and her white hair spread out on the rug. Maybe she was fifteen feet away, on the far side of the room. She looked heavier than she looked in normal life. (He thought of this because he imagined having to lift her for some reason, to carry her, in case she needed help.) Her sleeping face seemed somehow very German, frowning and patient, as it breathed in and out.

  Sliding glass doors separated the living room from her study, and Paul could see Jean sitting at their mother’s desk and tapping at a laptop computer. Then Jean noticed him and made a face, spreading her mouth without opening it, so that her lips widened and thinned, in a kind of frown or smile, while she looked down toward the floor where their mother slept. He nodded and walked out. Upstairs he found Cal in Jean’s old room, watching his cousin play Minecraft on an iPad.

  “How long have you guys been playing?”

  “I’m not playing,” Cal said.

  “It’s all right,” Ben told him. “My mom said it was okay.”

  His pale, somehow English face looked very assured; his glasses reflected the images on the screen.

  “I don’t want to sleep in a crib,” Cal said. “I want to sleep in a bed.”

  Paul looked at them both for a moment—the twelve-year-old boy and the four-year-old boy, sitting on an unmade bed, in the dark room. “Okay,” he said and left them there. The green-tiled bathroom was at the end of the hall, and he locked the door and set his backpack on the floor. Undressing, he glanced at himself in th
e mirror over the sink, then under the hot water he closed his eyes.

  *

  Jean was looking for flights out of Boston that afternoon, something with possible connections to Austin, or even Houston or Dallas, or flights out of TF Green—anything. Nathan had promised to try; he and Clémence were getting their bags packed, they hadn’t expected to leave until the morning. When Jean wanted to call him, she stepped outside. Liesel’s study had French doors that opened onto the balcony, a corner unprotected by the porch roof, which meant that for nine months a year it was too hot to use. Leaves ended up gathering there, nobody swept it, but it was pleasant now to stand out in the bright winter sunshine and talk to your brother on the phone.

  She could see down the curve of the street toward Hemphill Park, where she had learned to ride a bike on the short grass, pushed by Bill, hour after hour, though he couldn’t ride one himself—and feel the peculiar transposition of jet lag, since two days ago she was sitting with Henrik on the top deck of the 52 bus, moving in traffic along the Harrow Road, after going out for dinner. Always, she was aware of the time of day in England, eight at night, Emil’s bedtime, Henrik would be turning out his light, and could feel it in her body, too, the split time zones, two biological clocks ticking at once. When Nathan picked up, she said, “How long will it take you to drive to Providence?”

  “At this time of day, at this time of year? Anything from an hour to whatever, depending on traffic. You’ve got a lot of people leaving the city. I-95 gets pretty packed.”

  “Okay, so you need to get in the car now. In the next half hour.”

  “Look, Jean,” he started to say.

  “There are five seats left on a flight out of TF Green, which gets into Charlotte around seven o’clock. From Charlotte you can catch a plane to DFW—there’s a two-hour layover, you should have plenty of time. And with the time-zone change, it won’t even be that late when you get in.”

  “Get in where?”

  “To Dallas. It lands at ten.”

  “Look, Jean,” he said again. “I’ve been thinking about this. What we should really do is find somewhere to stay in New York and help out with Rose. We should spend Christmas with Bill.”

  “Have you spoken to him?”

  “The number he gave us for the hospital room isn’t answering. I don’t know. I expected him to be there by this point. Clémence thinks that maybe we have a cell phone number for Judith—she’s checking her email. I don’t know. What do we do when we get to Dallas? I mean, after a certain point, it gets a little crazy. When’s the last shuttle to Austin?”

  “You’ll miss that, but it doesn’t matter—”

  “You know we don’t drive long distances at night. I just fall asleep—both of us do. We could check in to an airport hotel, but it all adds up. I mean, at that point it becomes a two-day trip.”

  “I’ll pick you up. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You can’t pick us up. It’s six hours in the car.”

  “It’s three hours. At that time of night, maybe less.”

  “I mean, both ways. This is sweet of you, but at a certain point …”

  “What do I care,” Jean said. “What else am I going to do. I’m jet-lagged anyway. So I listen to NPR for three hours, and on the way back, we can talk. We can spend some time.”

  “I want to see you, too,” Nathan said.

  “Liesel was in tears at lunch when she heard you might not make it. After Bill left this morning.”

  “I understand that, but really, if it’s a question of that … Let me see if I can get in touch with Bill, let me see if I can find out what’s going on.”

  “By that point, you’ll miss the flight.”

  “There’ll be other flights.”

  “I’m not sure there will be. Let me buy it now—it may already be too late.”

  “How much is this going to cost? Two thousand dollars, maybe more? When the marginal utility is … debatable, given that Bill could probably do with some company right now.”

  Jean, staring at their neighbor’s front yard, where the father of one of her old school friends was trying to clear out the leaves from the heating and air-conditioning unit, said, “No, that’s true, that’s probably true.”

  “Let’s just—maybe it’s best just to admit …”

  “It means a lot to me that you come.” There was a silence at the other end of the phone, and after a moment, Jean went on: “Henrik is flying in on Boxing Day. Anyway, it means a lot to me. But you’re right. You should go to Bill. In which case, you probably want to set off pretty soon anyway. To beat the weather.”

  Nathan, at the other end, speaking into her ear (he sounded very close, a presence in her head), said: “Give me five minutes. Let me talk to Clémence. I’ll call you back in five.” And he hung up.

  Jean waited on the balcony with the phone in her hand—her ear felt hot from the pressure of the handset, she must have been pressing it hard. When they were younger, this neighbor guy looked like all the other dads, he was just a category of person. Now he had put on weight, he had lost his hair, his scalp looked pink and smooth, and there were white tufts of uncropped hair around his ears. And yet at the same time, he seemed to have changed very little, he moved more slowly, but he was always deliberate, and the weight gain had kept his face unwrinkled.

  He noticed Jean on the balcony and stood up to wave. Jean waved back and he called to her: “Daryl’s flying in next week. How long are you around for?”

  “That’s nice. Till the third. Where’s she coming in from?”

  “Sioux Falls. She’s staying with her in-laws out there, the kids like the snow.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “They get Christmas, we get New Year.”

  “That’s how it goes.”

  “Everybody’s at that time of life.”

  He pressed his hands against his lower back and stretched out, frowning. The clothes he wore were the clothes he always wore, jeans and a white T-shirt and a collared shirt unbuttoned over the T-shirt. “You’re in London, Bill tells me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Wet,” Jean said, and then felt ashamed of fobbing him off with this kind of answer. “I like it. It’s one of those cities where … everybody’s doing interesting things.” But this isn’t what she felt either.

  He looked at her for a few seconds, waiting maybe to see if she was going to say something else. “I’ll tell her you’re around,” he said eventually and went back to his work, turning away from her and leaning over.

  Jean went inside; she wanted to check the ticket availability anyway and sat down at her mother’s computer to refresh the page. Liesel collected old glass—there was a bookshelf full of it next to the desk, decanters and crystal goblets but also champagne coupes and a row of faintly cranberry-colored water glasses, with an odd bubble or two seeming to rise against the surface. The bookshelf itself was the old-fashioned kind, dark wood with rickety hinges, and glass shields that could be lowered or raised. Liesel had wedged photographs into the jambs, and while she waited Jean looked at them. Part of the point of coming home was the density of association, you seemed to move through a thicker material. There was a picture of Paul, maybe five years old, dressed from head to toe in red oilcloth—his fireman’s suit. A picture of Jean, too: standing in rubber boots in a pile of snow. Must have been taken in Europe. It almost never snowed in Austin, and even if it did, it didn’t stick. Nathan at his high-school graduation, just a Polaroid, very poor quality. He was smiling the way you smile when you’re a teenager, not quite in control of how you come across. And one of Susie’s little watercolor sketches, about the size of a postcard, of the house in Germany where Liesel grew up: a tall, peaked tile roof, red bricks and white window frames, on a green lawn with the sea behind it, and Denmark, a thin green line across the water.

  Next to it, and partly tucked behind, was a black-and-white photograph of Liesel as a young woman, her long dark hair in a
braid, she looked thin and nervous and happy, and prettier than either of her daughters. Hard to say where it was taken—maybe Berlin, in her student flat, the one she shared with her cousin. Now she lay fifty years older sleeping on a rug on the floor five thousand miles away.

  When the phone rang, Jean thumbed the receiver and pressed it again to her ear—the seats were still free, the price hadn’t changed, she stared at the screen.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “We’re getting in the car. If you could buy the tickets now I’ll pay you back later. Just email them—to Clémence’s account, not mine. Okay. We’ll call you from the road.”

  “I’ll see you in Fort Worth.”

  “I’ll see you in Fort Worth.”

  “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “With luck.”

  He didn’t say anything else but he didn’t hang up either, and eventually Jean said, “I’m really pleased,” and he said, “Me, too. Thank you. All right, I should go,” and the line went dead.

  Liesel had been woken by the ring and lay with her eyes closed, still out of it but vaguely aware that her daughter was talking on the phone. There’s a kind of half-state, before full consciousness, when reality doesn’t press very hard. She felt the floor under the rug under her back; she knew where she was, but in the darkness she wasn’t really committed to any of it, and wondered for a moment if she might drift back to sleep. She liked listening to Jean’s voice and tried to work out from the tone of intimacy who she might be talking to, a puzzle that pulled her slowly back to consciousness. Henrik maybe. She heard her say, “I’m really pleased,” and felt a pang of brief anxiety at the thought of his coming visit. Maybe it was just as well Bill wasn’t around. He had less patience than she did for … irregular arrangements. The fact that Henrik was so much older, almost closer to their age than to Jean’s, didn’t help. For a moment, she thought of her daughter as a thirty-two-year-old woman, making choices about her life, the way other women make choices. Taking on another man’s kids, at least part-time. But she didn’t recognize her in this light. It was all a kind of elaborate pretending, which everybody for some reason went along with … But this is foolishness, she told herself, it’s wishful thinking. Okay, okay. Okay. You should get up.