World Without You Read online

  “You’ll turn anything into a competition, won’t you, Mom?”

  “Whenever possible.”

  Clarissa’s kneeling at the service line, scooping up balls in each hand. She deposits them into the bucket, and when she rises, clay is caked to her calves. Outside the fence lie more balls, and as she goes to retrieve them she recalls a childhood game of tennis with Leo, when he must have been no more than five, and she, the forbearing big sister, spending the afternoon among the dandelions, fishing out errant balls.

  It starts to rain.

  “Hurry up!” Marilyn says. “We’re almost done!”

  But there are still thirty, forty balls to be retrieved. Clarissa runs into the garage to seek cover, but her mother remains on the court, jogging from ball to ball, using that quick jerk of the foot to flip them into the bucket.

  Finally, drenched herself, Marilyn runs across the court to the garage, the balls hopping as she goes. She subsides onto a folding chair next to Clarissa. She wrings out her hair at her feet.

  “Mission accomplished?” Clarissa says.

  “We rescued what we could.”

  It’s raining harder now. Fog settles heavily on the court. Clarissa leans back in her chair so it’s resting on only two legs. She’s staring straight ahead of her.

  “Talk to me, darling,” Marilyn says. “With everything that’s been happening between Dad and me, I haven’t heard a word about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me.”

  But that’s the problem, Clarissa thinks. She isn’t sure what she wants to tell her mother, especially not now. “I’ve started to play the cello again.”

  “You have? Since when?”

  “Since Leo died, I guess. Just a little here, a little there.” She reaches down and picks up a tennis ball. She bounces it on the ground at her feet. “A few weeks ago, I ran into Mrs. Pritchett on the subway. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, and there she was, looking the same as she always did. It was as if she’d been keeping tabs on me.”

  “She was good at that.”

  “She was.” And an image comes to Clarissa of Mrs. Pritchett’s apartment on West End Avenue, their cellos poised in front of them, as if they were squaring off. And afterward, when her lesson was over, Clarissa would join Mrs. Pritchett in her car and they would circle the streets of the Upper West Side, talking about music, about the cello, while Mrs. Pritchett negotiated the hazards of alternate-side-of-the-street parking, moving back and forth between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. “Do you know what she told me? ‘Two decades later, and your shoulders have finally straightened out.’”

  “I don’t get it.”

  It was the family joke, Clarissa reminds her mother. One of her father’s shoulders was lower than the other from having carried his briefcase all those years. And then the same thing happened to her, from all that time lugging her cello. For one of her birthdays, her parents got her a cello case on wheels. She would roll it on the subway to and from school. Her friends used to make fun of her; they would call her the stewardess. I’m Clarissa, they would say. Fly me.

  It was Leo who used to call her the Andre Agassi of string instruments. She picked up the violin when she was three, which was how old Agassi had been when he’d first held a tennis racquet, and soon he was sent off to tennis boot camp, where he practiced eight, nine hours a day. But Clarissa’s parents never pushed her. They played piano themselves, and later her mother took up the clarinet (Clarissa still remembers playing duets with her, home concerts for the entertainment of her siblings), and while they were reasonably skilled, they certainly weren’t gifted, and neither were Clarissa’s siblings or, as far as she knows, anyone else in her extended family, which was unusual, Mrs. Pritchett said; these things tended to run in the genes.

  And Clarissa was gifted. She’d been gifted at the violin, and she was even more gifted at the cello. Eight years old, ten years old, fourteen years old: she was up early practicing, up late practicing, and in the meantime she was going to a good school, where homework was expected of her and where the students did their homework. Had any child in the history of New York City ever gotten so little sleep? Her parents weren’t forcing her to practice. If anything, they were telling her to take it easy, to have fun. But Clarissa didn’t want to have fun. She wanted to practice the cello.

  Freshman year in music school, at Indiana University, she was starting to play less and less. She would spend her days wandering around Bloomington, her evenings drinking tea at the Runcible Spoon, in whose bathroom sat a tub filled with goldfish. She would sit in that bathroom, watching those goldfish do laps, and then she would return to her dormitory.

  Late at night, her boyfriend, also a cellist, studying at Eastman, would berate her for her dwindling practice hours. She was marooned in the Midwest, he reminded her, and what was she doing in the Midwest if she wasn’t playing music? What was she doing on earth if she wasn’t playing music? “Aren’t you happy playing the cello?” Her boyfriend meant this rhetorically, but the question floored Clarissa. No one had ever asked her this before, not her parents, whose exhortations to cut back must have been motivated, she realized later, by fear that she might not be happy; certainly not Mrs. Pritchett, who believed she had a gift and owed it to the world to pursue it.

  Now, though, having finally been asked, she realized that while she wasn’t unhappy, exactly, she wasn’t exactly happy either. And then, a week later, having allowed herself to take that step, she allowed herself to take another one. She was unhappy. Spring break of freshman year, she spent the whole week in bed. She didn’t eat; she didn’t answer the telephone; she didn’t see any of her friends. She decided right then to drop out of music school. She didn’t so much as return to Indiana to say goodbye to her classmates and professors. She couldn’t stand the thought of being back in Bloomington, of seeing her friends, her roommates, all those musicians, and so she sent her father to retrieve her belongings. The following year she transferred to Yale, which had an orchestra, a chamber music society, a jazz ensemble, but she refused to play in any of them. She majored in political science; she had left her cello back home in New York.

  For weeks, Mrs. Pritchett tried to convince her to change her mind, and when she saw that she couldn’t, she stopped calling. They didn’t speak again for twenty years, not until a few weeks ago, on the subway. Clarissa told Mrs. Pritchett what she was doing now, how she’s doling out money for international relief (“You know the Open Society Foundations? We’re like that, only smaller—we don’t have George Soros to bankroll us”), saying it all self-dismissively, because she is self-dismissive, and because she knew Mrs. Pritchett would be dismissive, too. She didn’t tell Mrs. Pritchett that she has started to play again. Because she didn’t—she doesn’t—want to be beholden to her, and because she didn’t wish to pretend she’s doing anything but dabbling. She hates being terrible at something she was once so good at. Not that she’s terrible, really, not by most lights, but by her own lights, by the lights of what she once was, she is terrible, and it pains her.

  An image comes to her of Leo as a toddler, bursting in on her lessons. He wanted to turn everything into a duet so that when she was practicing her scales, when she was having a go at Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, he was having a go at it, too, pounding the keys on their parents’ grand piano. Even Mrs. Pritchett, focused as she was on the task at hand, didn’t have the heart to tell him to stop, and so it was left to Clarissa’s father to haul him off so she could continue her lesson uninterrupted. And another image comes to her, a Halloween when he was seven, Leo taping himself up with her sheet music, getting ready for trick-or-treating; he called himself the Music Mummy. Her irrepressible little brother. Every year he would come home with more candy than anyone else. He was forever negotiating with the neighbors for extra Mars Bars and Blow Pops.

  “I might play something at the memorial,” she tells her mother.

  “What would you
play?”

  “Something basic,” she says. “Something Leo would have enjoyed.”

  “I know he would have liked that.”

  She’s quiet.

  “I remember what exquisite care you took of Leo. Dad used to call you the wet nurse. You kept pressing him to your chest, hoping he would nurse from you.”

  She laughs. “So this is why we have parents. So they can remind you of the embarrassing things you did when you were young.”

  “You were always Leo’s favorite,” her mother says.

  And he, in turn, had been her favorite, too. She’d been the first of the siblings to meet him. Born premature, he was in the NICU for weeks, where, when she visited, she would press her nose to the glass and make faces at him the way she did at the gorillas at the zoo. “Smile at me,” she would say. “Come on, Leo, smile at me.” Every day, her father retrieved her early from school and brought her to the hospital. Finally, when it was time to take Leo home, she was the one who unveiled him to her sisters. “Wash your hands before touching him. Leave him alone. He needs to rest!” She began her patrol outside his bedroom, one night actually collapsing on the floor. “Sleeping on the job?” her father said as he carried her down the hall to her bedroom. But the next day she was back at her station, even offering her mother advice on how to nurse. “If he’s going to get bigger, he needs more milk.”

  “I’d never seen anyone so proprietary,” her mother says.

  “Or such a taskmaster.”

  “For a while there, you were pretty insufferable, but you were also an amazing big sister.”

  “What about now?” Clarissa says. “Will I be a good mother?”

  “I didn’t realize you wanted to be one.”

  “Why? Because I’m thirty-nine and …”

  “I guess that’s part of it.”

  She’s quiet.

  “You were always so focused. It was cello, cello, and more cello. You were good at blocking everything else out.”

  Again Clarissa thinks of Andre Agassi, running around with his tennis racquet when he was only three; that racquet must have been bigger than he was. There’s a photo of her when she was a girl, with her cello standing next to her like some gangly older cousin.

  “You never said anything about children,” her mother says, “so Dad and I assumed you weren’t interested in them.”

  “For a long time, I wasn’t.”

  “And we didn’t want to put pressure on you. We didn’t want to be the kind of parents who breathed down their daughter’s neck.”

  “Well, Nathaniel and I have been trying for a year.”

  “Have you seen …”

  “A doctor?”

  “Besides the one you’re sitting next to now?”

  Clarissa gets up and walks onto the tennis court, picking up more balls as she goes. She’s never been able to stand disorder, and it seems she can’t stand it now. A few strands of hair are slicked fast to her cheeks. Rain drips down her forehead. “Listen, Mom, I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I want to talk about you, Mom. Why in the world are you leaving Dad?”

  “I told you already. If you didn’t understand it the first time, I don’t see how I can do any better now.” A giant elm tree gives them cover, though now, when a breeze comes through, it washes water onto them.

  “Think about the practical things,” Clarissa says. “Is there going to be a big court case? Will you be hiring expensive lawyers?”

  “Clarissa, Dad and I have decided to separate. Hiring lawyers is the farthest thing from our minds.”

  “But it could come to that.”

  “We’re not that way.”

  “No one’s that way until they become that way.”

  “What do we have to fight over? This house?”

  “For one.”

  “We’ll sell it and split the proceeds. I don’t need Dad’s money and he doesn’t need mine. I make a good salary. Dad did fine, too, when he was teaching, and now he’s collecting retirement.”

  “Grandma will cut you out of the will.”

  “If she does, so be it. I never planned to marry rich.”

  “But you got used to it.”

  “Inasmuch as anyone gets used to Gretchen. It’s like getting used to gravity. She’s just there.”

  “But it’s a good kind of there. It gives you a cushion.”

  “Maybe so, but mostly I just try to ignore it. And when I’m not ignoring it, I’m paying attention to it in such a way that I might as well be ignoring it.”

  “How?”

  “By not buying something I could buy anyway and probably would buy anyway were it not for the fact that I’m afraid I’d be buying it because I could come into a big inheritance someday.”

  “What wouldn’t you buy?”

  “A necklace, a nice coat, the strawberries for six dollars at Dean and Deluca when I could get the same strawberries elsewhere for half the price. Dad’s even worse. He always thought Grandma was spoiling you kids. ‘Why can’t she visit without bringing gifts?’ he would say, and I would say, ‘Because she likes to bring gifts, it makes her happy, indulge her, David.’ So he did for a while—at least he tried—but then her second husband died and she married again and she was living in New York, we were seeing her all the time, and she was still bringing gifts. I remember your childhood as one enduring battle between Dad and me over which of Grandma’s gifts we could keep. Her last husband owned a fleet of Jaguars and one time Grandma brought Leo a toy Jaguar. Dad hated that car. If his son was going to ride around in a toy car, it wasn’t going to be in a toy Jaguar.”

  “And look at Dad’s wreck of a car now,” Clarissa says. “When is he going to get rid of it?” She’s staring at the car dripping rain in the driveway, bathed in the vestigial glow of the tennis court lights.

  “I’ll tell you when he’s going to get rid of it. Never. Dad says he likes Volvos, so I say, ‘Fine, buy yourself a new Volvo,’ but he doesn’t want a new Volvo, he wants an old Volvo, preferably one that’s about to break down. It’s the same thing with his clothes. Nothing gets thrown out until it’s threadbare. So if you think we’re going to take each other to court, you don’t have a clue.” She starts to cry.

  “Mom …”

  “Do you think this is easy for me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, it’s been dreadful.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  “I told you,” she says, rising from her seat, and her voice is full of impatience. “Dad and I can’t talk to each other.”

  “Of course you can. I saw you two last night.”

  “Listen to me, Clarissa. Dad says he’s tired, but he’s not too tired to come home after midnight and refuse to tell me where he’s been. He started running after Leo died, and do you know how many miles he runs a week? I’m busy, too—I’m the one who still works—but I come home at night, I’m available to him.”

  “Have you told him this?”

  “Come on, Clarissa. Even when he’s there, he’s not there. He spends his time practicing his librettos. He sings more than he speaks. Most of the time when I hear his voice it’s in Italian.”

  Clarissa’s quiet now. She looks down at the racquets, which lie at her feet, like two giant fly swatters.

  “If you want to blame me, I’m fine with that, but I have just one request. I want these next couple of days to be normal.”

  “Oh, Mom. How in the world can they possibly be normal?”

  “I want us to have the memorial exactly as we’ve been planning to have it. I want us to be sad in exactly the way we were going to be sad. And then, when it’s all over, if you want to hate me—”

  “Mom, I don’t hate you.”

  “As long as you don’t hate me for the next couple of days, that’s all I care about. The memorial—this whole holiday—is for Leo.

  “Okay,” Clarissa says, but then she’s off, back to the
house, her sneakers hitting the wet pavement. She passes her father’s Volvo, the beige paint peeling, the chassis looking as if it’s about to cave in on itself. She walks under the bird feeder and beyond the geraniums that line the front path, and just before she moves out of sight, she looks back at her mother still sitting in her chair beneath the garage overhang, the bucket of tennis balls at her feet. She steps quietly into the house, and when she reaches the landing she removes her shoes so as not to track mud across the floor.

  When she gets upstairs, she finds Lily and Noelle standing in the hallway.

  “How’s Mom?” Noelle asks.

  “Bullheaded as ever. She wants us to act as if everything’s normal.”

  “Normal?” Noelle says.

  “What are you going to do?” says Lily.

  “I guess I’ll have to try,” Clarissa says. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Down the hall the door has opened; one of the boys is stumbling toward them, wrapped in a sheet.

  “Dov, honey,” Noelle says. “Go back to bed.”

  “Is it true?” he says. “Do Grandma and Grandpa not love each other anymore?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Akiva,” Dov says.

  “Oh, honey.”

  “Well, is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Lily bends over to pick Dov up.

  “What do you think?” Dov asks her. “Have Grandma and Grandpa stopped loving each other?”

  “It’s complicated,” Lily says.

  But Dov is only five, and that answer itself is too complicated for him.

  Now Lily has handed him to Noelle, who carries him, wrapped like a burrito in his sheet, back to the bedroom where his brothers are sleeping.

  “‘It’s complicated,’” Lily says to Clarissa. “Isn’t that something from Facebook.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Clarissa says. “I’m not on Facebook.”