The World Without You Read online

  “Did you call your mother?” she asks.

  He nods.

  “You didn’t tell her, did you?” That was their agreement—the agreement, at least, that she extracted from him. No one is to know until after the memorial.

  “No,” he says sharply. “I didn’t.”

  “Then what did you two talk about?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “She’s a woman of few words, Marilyn.”

  “So what were her few words?”

  “She’s not coming.”

  “Are you serious?” And she thinks: You told her not to come, didn’t you? Except, she realizes, she’s actually said those words.

  “My mother’s been through a lot. Do you blame her for not wanting to go through it again? She’s ninety-four years old.”

  “I know how old she is.”

  He’s quiet.

  “She’s ninety-four, and she’ll live to a hundred and forty. She has a stronger constitution than any of us.”

  She’s washing the dishes now, going at them furiously, while David is still chopping behind her, the percussive sound of him. He presses down hard on a carrot, and the top comes flying off and sails across the room. “Jesus,” he says. “Fuck! I cut myself.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Bad enough.” There’s a gash in his thumb. It looks shallow at first, but now, studying it beneath the sink light, Marilyn sees it’s deeper than she realized. She takes a wad of paper towel and presses it to his hand. But the blood seeps through, so she goes to the pantry to get more paper towel, and when she returns his hands are shaking.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know.” He sits down on the stool and she’s above him now, attending to him. She runs his hand under cold water. The blood drips off him and into the sink, down into the garbage disposal along with the vegetable peel and citrus rind, swirling around like beet juice. She comes back with tape and a gauze pad and bandages him up.

  “Slicing and Dicing 101, huh? They should have flunked me out.”

  She presses her hands around his, wrapping him in gauze, as if she’s taping up a fighter.

  “How am I doing, doctor?”

  She forces out a smile. She’s an internist by training, but she did a second residency, in infectious disease. He has come to the wrong specialist. “You’re lucky you don’t need stitches.”

  “Do I need them?”

  “I think I staunched the flow.”

  She guides him upstairs and into their old bedroom. She has him in their bathroom beneath the flickering lights, and David is saying, “We need to replace that bulb. And the mirror,” he adds. “It has a crack in it. Hairline fracture.”

  But she’s focused only on the task at hand, urging him to remain still. She takes off the bandage, which is shot through with blood, and wraps his hand again.

  You’re as good as new, she wants to say, but her breath catches on the words. They’re out of the bathroom, and now David, in his white gym socks, is sitting on their old bed; tentatively, she settles herself beside him. One of his socks has a hole in it, and his big toe pokes out, white as a marshmallow nub. Through the window, she can see the tennis court still dotted with balls, lumpy as dough in the moonlight. Clean up, clean up. The girls will be coming soon, and they might want to play. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right.”

  She’s quiet.

  “Time to hit the hay.”

  She nods. At home in the city, they’ve been sleeping in separate bedrooms, but this is the first time they’ve been back here, up in Lenox, alone together. It seems that David has claimed their old bedroom. Squatter’s rights. Though she, in fairness, is a squatter, too. She’s also, she understands, the bad guy here. David’s suitcase is on the floor at his feet; a shoe tree spills out of it, and a can of shaving cream.

  “Good night,” she says.

  He gives her a quick nod.

  She turns softly on her heels and heads down the hall. When she comes back a few minutes later, David is already asleep. There he is, her husband, and she feels a momentary heartbreak, knowing she’s not supposed to be looking at him, that somehow she’s not entitled. But she continues to stand there, tears falling down her face. She’s back in their house in Larchmont, back in other houses and apartments, remembering hallways, portals, a domed ceiling high above the family dinner table, bedrooms whose configurations she can only dimly recall outside of which she used to stand at night quietly watching her children sleep—and later, listening to David breathe softly beside her, and she, a stealthy presence among the reposed, careful not to disturb the sleep of a loved one.

  1

  It’s five-thirty in the morning and still dark out, but Clarissa lies awake, as she’s been for the last hour, her feet thrumming against the bed, performing their solemn agitations. Nathaniel lies undisturbed beside her. At this hour, any reasonable person would be asleep, but especially Nathaniel, who considers waking up early an affront. If it were up to him, Nathaniel would keep the schedule of a college student, which, at forty-four, is what he still looks like, a lanky teenager all bone and sinew, with dark hair so straight you could measure something with it. He’s beautiful, Clarissa thinks, and she loves him dearly, but watching him sleep makes her quietly enraged. It’s a common feeling, she supposes—sleep to the sleepless can seem like taunting—though Nathaniel is no common sleeper. He lies flat on his back as if pinioned to the mattress, his arms raised above his head in a look of benevolent supplication. “Nathaniel,” she whispers, trying to wake him without appearing to do so.

  “Mmm …”

  “It’s morning,” she says. “Sort of.”

  She waters the African violets, then tends to the cactus beside the bed. She’s the family horticulturist—Nathaniel says he’s indifferent to plants—but she can be lazy about watering them. Often she cheats, watering deeply but infrequently, letting the liquid pool at the bottom of the planters and hoping that, like cats, the plants will eat only when they’re hungry. So far, at least, they don’t seem to be suffering. She has chosen bulbs that don’t require much attention, and thanks to the small garden she and Nathaniel have out back, she, a city girl, has found a new identity; she has become a grower of herbs and a puller of weeds.

  She removes her suitcase from the closet and packs jeans, T-shirts, running shoes, underwear, then tosses several paperbacks into the bag, though they’ll be gone for only a few days. Evelyn Wood, her sisters used to call her. When she was ten, she saw a speed-reading advertisement on TV in which a woman was reading as fast as she could turn pages, and though her parents wouldn’t let her take the course, she gave herself her own speed-reading class, learning to move her forefinger diagonally down the page.

  A couple of stray socks have landed on the chair, and she disposes of them.

  “Tidying up for the housekeeper?” Nathaniel says.

  “Not only.”

  “You keep that up, we should pay you.”

  If Brooklyn seceded from the other boroughs it would be the fourth-largest city in the United States; right now, though, it’s as silent as a mausoleum. At the window, Clarissa stands sentinel over the row of brownstones, and presently she hears the sanitation workers collecting the garbage. A man crosses the street walking his collie; a FreshDirect truck drives by. Soon the rest of the neighborhood will be up, too, off to their holiday destinations, just as she and Nathaniel will be off to theirs, to her parents’ country house in the Berkshires. Lily will be driving up from D.C.; Noelle and her family are flying in from Jerusalem. With all the children and luggage, it will take both Clarissa and Lily to transport everyone to Lenox, so they’ll be meeting Noelle at Logan Airport. And there’s her and Nathaniel’s own business to attend to first.

  Gwendolyn, their hundred-pound Bernese Mountain Dog, lumbers into the room. “Good morning, you,” Clarissa says. “Have you come to say goodbye?” Gwendolyn will need to be kenneled for the holiday. Lily and Malcolm will have to kennel their dog, t
oo, because one of Noelle’s boys is allergic to dogs.

  “You look pretty,” Nathaniel says.

  “It’s six in the morning, Nathaniel. No one looks pretty at this hour.” She’s in her underwear, wearing a T-shirt that reads, WHAT IF THE HOKEY-POKEY REALLY IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT?

  “You do.”

  “You always say that.”

  “That’s because it’s true.”

  On the window ledge sits a plate of raisin scones, and she offers him one. Standing before him with the plate in her hand, she feels like a Girl Scout come to sell cookies.

  Nathaniel obediently eats a scone, making noises of approval, but she can feel the effort in his response. More and more he’s been doing things to please her, and though she’s grateful for this, it also makes her think that he’s mollifying her, that there’s a tinge of appeasement to his kindness. “I made those myself.”

  “When?”

  “Four in the morning?” she says. “Maybe three?”

  It’s not bad, she thinks, taking a bite of scone; maybe she has a talent she never recognized. When they were growing up, Noelle used to call her the Girl Voted Most Likely to Succeed. In her high school—it’s been more than twenty years now—the students were too busy airlifting food to Nicaragua, helping organize the grape workers, spending their summers on farm collectives for anyone to have been voted most likely to succeed, and even if someone had been, it wouldn’t have been her. She graduated from Yale, an entire college of students voted most likely to succeed: the pleasers and résumé padders. She’s never been like that. Still, she isn’t used to failure, and everything that’s been happening these past months weighs heavily on her. It weighs heavily on Nathaniel too, but he expresses it differently.

  She fills the toiletry kit with toothbrushes, deodorant, a razor, dental floss. There’s gum disease in Nathaniel’s family, so he flosses regularly, and Clarissa, who hates to floss, has tried to take this as inspiration. The family that flosses together stays together, she says. At the drugstore, she will stock up on floss, dropping ten rolls of it at the register. “Big family?” the cashier asked one time. “Eight kids,” Clarissa said, back when she was able to joke about such things.

  The forecast is for rain tonight, perhaps tomorrow as well, but on July Fourth itself it’s supposed to be clear. It’s the one-year anniversary of Leo’s death, and with Noelle flying in for the memorial, it will be the first time since the funeral that the whole family will be together. Thisbe and Calder will be flying in, too. Calder is three now; Clarissa can hardly believe it.

  She examines herself in the bathroom mirror. Her hair has turned strawberry blond, which is what happens every summer; the rest of the year she’s a redhead. In one shade or another, all the sisters are. Leo was a redhead, too. When they were growing up, you could always recognize the Frankel children. Now, in Israel, Noelle covers her hair, and it pains Clarissa to think about her sister’s lovely red hair, which no one is allowed to see except Amram. She has reminded Noelle how beautiful she used to be—she’s still beautiful, of course—and how when Noelle first came to Israel the men called her gingy and trailed her on the streets, how they all thought she’d grown up on a kibbutz until they heard her speak Hebrew.

  She allows herself to wonder whether Nathaniel is right and maybe she has become beautiful herself; he’s so ardent and convincing. Her eyes are the green of freshly sliced cucumber, her face long like a mare’s, with a birthmark on the right side going down to her neck. Mostly it just looks like she has a suntan, though it used to make her self-conscious. When she moves, it’s as if she’s walking in and out of shadows. “We’ll need to have sex at my parents’ place.”

  “It’s been done before.”

  “The house will be overrun with grandchildren.”

  “All the better,” he says. “No one will notice when we sneak off.” He looks up at her from across the room. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking my breasts,” she says sheepishly. “I know. I must look like a porn star.”

  “No,” he says. “Just like a compulsive.”

  Without even realizing it, she has developed a routine. She checks her breasts for bloating, then searches for headaches and other signs. She sticks her fingers inside her vagina to see if her cervix has gotten softer, and if it has opened a little. But it’s hard to determine whether her cervix is harder or softer, further up or further back, more closed or more open. She’s so focused on her body she can give herself pains she doesn’t really have. Sometimes she feels a headache coming on; she almost wills herself to have one. Oh, God, I have a headache. It has become a joke between her and Nathaniel. It’s the reverse of the old adage: headaches are now an aphrodisiac.

  She puts half a dozen ovulation kits into her suitcase, though she knows that’s more than she’ll need. In their early months together, back when they were still using condoms, Nathaniel would stick ten, twelve condoms into his suitcase, even though they were going away for just the weekend; often they were visiting Clarissa’s parents’ country house itself. “Well, well, Mister Big Shot,” Clarissa said.

  “You don’t want us to run out. Do they even have drugstores in that town your parents live in?”

  Haughty, haughty Nathaniel. Transplanted to New York, and with the transplant’s arrogance. He’s the one, after all, who grew up in a small town.

  For good measure, she throws in a couple of pregnancy tests. Her cycles are so irregular it’s impossible to chart them: forty days, fifty days, but then it’s nineteen, and she’s spending her lunch hour in the office bathroom, her money squandered on an array of pee sticks, lurching from ovulation test to pregnancy test and back again. She buys her ovulation tests in bulk so she won’t have to keep going back, and she rotates drugstores so the clerks won’t recognize her. Sometimes she has Nathaniel buy the tests for her; it seems only fair. In her twenties, she used to buy condoms with a casualness that bordered on disdain, but this feels different to her. There’s something more private about pregnancy than about sex, and although she understands the two are connected, it’s the trying to conceive that feels personal to her.

  In the bathroom, she removes the basal thermometer from its case and returns to bed. She’s supposed to take her temperature as soon as she wakes up, since any activity at all can affect the reading. But she’s been up most of the night; there’s no changing that. So she lies in bed in compensatory stillness, hoping to fool the temperature gods. She even closes her eyes, pretending to be asleep, the way she used to when she was a girl on those weekend trips to the Berkshires when she didn’t wish to play GHOST with Lily any longer and the only way to end the game was to feign sleep. She’s looking for a subtle drop followed by a sustained rise. The drop has already occurred, and it’s the rise she’s waiting for, an increase of half a degree.

  But her temperature is the same as it was yesterday. “Maybe I just don’t ovulate.”

  “Come on,” Nathaniel says. “The doctor says you do.” He walks barefoot across the room and rests his hand on her.

  “You must think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m crazy.”

  “Well, you’re not.” There’s an adamancy in Nathaniel’s voice. He has always been protective of her, even when the person attacking her is herself. “It takes the average woman many months to get pregnant.”

  “It’s been more than many months.” Besides, she has never felt average, and even if she did, other people’s difficulties don’t make hers any easier. She’s more impatient than average, she’s finding out.

  They’ve been trying for a year now; they started right after Leo died. She has gone to the doctor for some tests, and just last week she went in for more, but so far there have been no answers. The next step is to intervene medically. It’s a journey she’s willing to take, and Nathaniel is, too, though he’s a more reluctant traveler than she is. He mistrusts the medical establishment; once you start something, it’s hard
to know where it will end. One place it might end is with twins, and there are already twins on Nathaniel’s side of the family. As time has passed, Clarissa has come to think twins wouldn’t be so bad, but Nathaniel believes it’s hard enough when the children are spaced a few years apart. Clarissa doesn’t disagree. It has become such a part of her family’s lore that Noelle’s difficulties were the result of being her and Lily’s sister (to this day, her mother thinks that’s why Noelle is in Jerusalem, married to Amram, mother of four) that no one can contradict it any longer. And maybe her mother is right. Clarissa doesn’t care. She doesn’t think her family should be a cautionary tale. “I’m thirty-nine,” she reminds him. “That’s one away from forty, in case you forgot.”

  “You just need to be patient.”

  “Please, Nathaniel. Stop it.” Often his confidence seems cavalier, but she has come to rely on it just the same; she doesn’t know what she’d do if they both were pessimistic. But then she asks herself how he can be so calm if they claim to want the same thing. It’s not that she wishes he were more understanding. He’s been hopelessly, infuriatingly understanding; it’s his very understanding that assails her. What she wants is for him to be upset. She has begun to wonder whether he wants a baby as much as she does, whether, despite everything he says, he’d be as miserable as she would be if they couldn’t have a child.

  She removes an ovulation test from her suitcase and, squatting on the toilet, pees into the cup. She doubts she’s ovulating—her temperature didn’t rise—but measuring your basal temperature isn’t foolproof. If the pee stick is positive, the second line is as dark as or darker than the first.

  She hands the stick to Nathaniel. “What do you think?”

  “The control is darker.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nods.

  She breaks the stick in half and throws it against the wall.