Morningside Heights Read online

  “It’s only ten-thirty.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Fine,” she said. “You want to leave, we’ll leave.” She didn’t know why she was making such a fuss about this; this was his party, not hers. She hated New Year’s Eve, with its forced merriment, everyone insisting you whoop it up.

  She tucked him into bed when they got home, and with nothing else to do, she turned on the TV; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d watched the ball drop. It was 11:40, and she didn’t think she could stomach another twenty minutes of this.

  In the early-morning hours of 2006, she listened to the revelers on the street, to the residual fireworks going off, and, beside her, to Spence’s quiet breathing. Why had he ruined the party for her? Why had he ruined it for them both? Formal wear, festive wear: what difference did it make? She could have made that mistake herself.

  * * *

  —

  One night, she saw a rat outside their building, wading through the garbage. “I hate rats,” she said.

  “Just be thankful it’s not in our apartment.”

  He must have jinxed them because the following week she saw not a rat, but its close cousin, a mouse, scuttling down the hallway.

  “How did it get here?” Spence said.

  “The way mice always get places. They squeeze through holes.”

  “Well, we need a plan.”

  “The plan will be to call Felix.” It was one of the benefits of a full-service building. The superintendent killed your mice for you.

  But Spence insisted on killing the mouse himself.

  “You want to lay traps?”

  “I’m going to catch it with my own two hands.”

  She thought he was joking, but the next day, she found him opening drawers and cabinets, looking in the utility closet, burrowing into nooks. He kept the broom at his side, as if he were hoping to impale the mouse.

  The next night, she spotted the mouse again, coming out of the linen closet, and she screamed.

  Soon Spence was in the closet himself, swatting at the pillows and blankets.

  “That’s not how you catch a mouse.”

  “Screaming’s not how you catch a mouse either.” He was clutching the broom, moving from one end of the apartment to the other, lurching like a drunkard.

  In the middle of the night, he shot up from bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I saw the mouse.”

  “You didn’t see the mouse. Go back to sleep, please.”

  But he had the light on and was searching about the room.

  The following day, he saw the mouse several more times. He kept lunging at it—with his hands, with the broom, one time with a letter opener. The mouse appalled Pru—she walked around expecting to see it, which made her feel as if she were seeing it—but more distressing was what it was doing to Spence. She wanted to catch the mouse just so he would stop giving chase. “This can’t go on. I’m calling Felix.”

  “Give me one more week. If I haven’t caught it by then, you can call in reinforcements.”

  But when a week passed and the mouse was still alive, and when Spence, despite his promises, said they should leave Felix out of this, she went to the store and bought mousetraps. She baited two with peanut butter and two with cheese and spread them strategically about the apartment.

  “It’s not going to work,” Spence said.

  “You act as if you don’t want it to work.” Pru herself wasn’t sure she wanted it to work; if it did work, she’d have to dispose of the body.

  The next night, she heard a snap in the kitchen. She knew what had happened, but just to be sure, she spent the next hour rereading the same page of her book.

  Finally, she went into the kitchen.

  She put on a pair of dish gloves, and with her eyes closed, her breath held, she dropped the dead mouse into a garbage bag. Then she placed the gloves into the garbage bag, too. Finally, she placed the garbage bag inside another garbage bag.

  When she got to the lobby, she moved quickly and deposited the mouse in the dumpster across the street.

  Back upstairs, she had a thought. She wouldn’t tell Spence what had happened. He would be upset to know her plan had worked. The mouse would simply stop showing up, and before long he would put the broom away. She bought another trap and replaced the discarded one.

  Over the next few days, Spence became lethargic. It was as if, without a mouse to chase, he’d lost his resolve.

  They went out to dinner at a local Italian place, but he just picked at his food. “Don’t think you can fool me.”

  “What?”

  “I know you trapped that mouse.”

  She started to speak, but he wouldn’t let her. “Mice don’t just disappear.”

  “Spence…”

  “The trap was missing when I woke up the other day. You went out and bought a new one.”

  “I didn’t want to…”

  “What?” he said. “Show me up?”

  “Come on, darling. Do you really think I care if you can catch a mouse?”

  He lowered his head to the table. “You’re right. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “Honey…”

  “The whole thing was lunatic.”

  “The mouse is gone. That’s the only thing that matters.”

  Dessert had come—cannoli and tiramisu—and Spence’s appetite had returned; he ate his own dessert and half of hers. His spirits had lifted; the color had returned to his face. Things were going to get better, she was sure of it. She paid the check, and they went out onto the street.

  6

  Rosh Hashanah came, and Pru proposed that they make New Year’s resolutions. “I resolve to be a more patient person,” she said. “And I resolve to start exercising.” She thought if she exercised, maybe Spence would exercise, too. He needed to get the endorphins coursing through him.

  “Here’s my New Year’s resolution,” Spence said. “I’m going to make headway on that book I’ve been writing.”

  Pru was relieved to hear this. Spence had signed a contract with his publisher for a new annotated Shakespeare. They needed the money, living on Spence’s modest salary and her own even more meager one, siphoning off funds to whatever supplicant came their way: to Enid, to Linda, for years to Arlo. When his agent had sent him the contract, Pru nearly forced him to sign it, and the ink hadn’t even dried before he was ruing what he’d done. “It’s a book for general readers,” he’d said. “It’s not real scholarship.”

  “Real scholarship doesn’t pay the bills.”

  Now he went straight to his study, and not a sound came from inside until lunchtime, when she knocked on the door.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “I need to concentrate.”

  But his computer had gone to sleep, and he looked sleepy himself. His cheek was imprinted with the pattern of the desk. His face had been lying against it.

  * * *

  —

  The next day she said, “How’s it going?”

  “You’re asking about my book?”

  She was. But she was trying to do it unobtrusively and, once again, she was failing. When Spence signed the contract, he’d gotten a quarter of his advance, but that had been almost two years ago. “When’s your next deadline?”

  “Sometime soon, I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  She found the contract in his files, and slowly the information settled on her. He was three months late on his next installment! If he didn’t make progress soon, she worried his publisher would take back his advance.

  His hands fell onto the keyboard, and on some unnamed document he hadn’t begun there appeared a row of Ms, Ls, Ws, and Zs: a hieroglyph of resignation. “There,” he said. “That’s what I think of this book.”

&nbs
p; She simply stared at him.

  “Don’t look at me that way. I don’t see you writing any books.”

  “That’s because I didn’t agree to write one.”

  He picked up the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling my agent. I’m asking for more time.”

  But a few seconds later, he hung up. “You don’t know me.”

  “Of course I know you.” There was no one in the world she knew better. And there was no one he knew better than her.

  “Then you should understand I’m not suited for this. It’s taking me away from my scholarship.”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, Pru saw Phillip, Spence’s teaching assistant, walking along Broadway.

  “Is everything okay with Professor Robin?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Why?”

  “Something seems off about him.” He had bags under his eyes, Phillip said; he looked depleted. Sometimes, when Spence was talking to Phillip and the other TAs, he would lose his train of thought. It had started to happen in class too. “It’s bizarre,” he said. “It’s like he’s having, I don’t know, an episode.”

  “That is bizarre.”

  “He’s probably just tired.”

  She was several strides away when he called out again. “I don’t know if I should mention this, but his class evaluations have gotten worse.”

  “How much worse?”

  Over the last couple of years, Phillip said, there had been a steady decline. But with the most recent evaluations, the drop had been so steep he thought he was looking at the wrong evaluations.

  In the TAs’ office, Pru stood behind Phillip while he scrolled through the computer. The phrase came to her, The numbers don’t lie. She didn’t know whose words those were; they certainly weren’t hers or Spence’s. They’d been trained in the humanities; they believed the numbers always lied.

  But these numbers were deflating. There was a drop followed by another drop followed by a plummet, like a man falling off a cliff. “Spence has been going through a rough spell. It’s been a hard few months.” She shook Phillip’s hand, and this time she walked quickly out of the office before he could call her back.

  * * *

  —

  She told Camille what had been happening, and Camille said, “You should take him to the doctor.”

  “Spence hates doctors.”

  “They don’t have to be friends.”

  The next night, standing in her nightgown as she brushed her teeth, she said, “I want you to go to the doctor.”

  “What’s a doctor going to tell me?”

  “If I knew, I’d be a doctor myself.”

  Months later, she would wonder why she hadn’t realized what she should have, and why, once she did realize, she continued to pretend.

  When had she first noticed something? When she’d turned fifty and Spence called her a youthful forty? When he woke up one night at four in the morning and put on his clothes to go to work? At the time she thought nothing of it: people got confused in the middle of the night. How, she wondered now, brushing her teeth, could there be something wrong with a man who so resisted going to the doctor? His very opposition was the proof.

  * * *

  —

  One night, she found a letter from Spence’s agent left out on his desk. He was a year late on the next installment of his book. If he didn’t get the pages in soon, the publisher was threatening to cancel his contract.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  He didn’t answer her.

  “That’s a lot of money we’ll be forced to return. Money we don’t have.”

  The next day, she called Spence’s agent. “He could use an extra six months.”

  The agent hesitated. “Every year that passes, that’s thousands more students who go untapped.”

  “I understand.”

  “The publishing industry has become less forgiving.”

  “Will you at least try?”

  A couple of days later, the agent called back. She had gotten Spence an extra year.

  “How about thanking me?” Pru said to Spence.

  But he just went into his study and closed the door.

  * * *

  —

  A few months passed, and she realized the extension wouldn’t make a difference. “Level with me,” she said. “Can you write this book?”

  “I make no promises.” Again he mentioned his values, the mercenary nature of writing a general-interest book. But it was all a fig leaf, as far as she was concerned. “Can you see this happening?” she said. And from the way he looked at her, staring into the great beyond, she had her answer.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll help you write the book.”

  “You’re not qualified.”

  “I went to graduate school.”

  He laughed at her, cruelly.

  “At least tell me your thoughts.”

  “I don’t have any thoughts.”

  “Come on, darling, of course you do. What’s the next chapter supposed to be about?”

  “The tragedies.”

  “Are you organizing them chronologically?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Okay,” she said, “chronologically it is.” On a yellow legal pad she wrote the words Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies. Titus Andronicus, she wrote beneath the heading, then Romeo and Juliet, followed by Julius Caesar, followed by Coriolanus. Was Coriolanus an early tragedy or a later one? It had been half a lifetime since she’d been in graduate school.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. The other week, he’d paused during lecture and hadn’t said anything for a full minute. There had been a stirring, then a silence, and one of the TAs had to escort him from the room, and another TA took over the class, saying he’d come down with the flu. “I wish it were the flu,” he said now. “Something’s wrong with me.”

  This was what she’d wanted—for him to stop pretending, so she could stop pretending, too.

  But now that he’d done it, she was stricken.

  She stayed up late surfing the web, typing symptoms into search engines, moving from website to website, a rat caroming through a maze, until it was six in the morning and she fell asleep with the computer still on, her head pitched against the desk.

  The next day, she wrote a check to Spence’s agent for $65,000. She expected him to fight her, but he simply hung his head. On the way to work, she dropped the check in the mail.

  7

  Sarah’s flight was late, so Pru sat armored in her Zipcar in a game of predator and prey with the airport police, idling outside Arrivals until she was told to leave, at which point she circled around to Departures, where she was allowed to tarry for a few minutes until the game started up once more. She spent an hour moving from terminal to terminal and along the Grand Central and the Van Wyck, revolving like the earth around the sun.

  Sarah, breezing through the New York night, cantering out the terminal doors and between the SuperShuttle vans and the limo drivers holding up their cards, looked tall as a beanpole, Pru thought. She’d always been tall, but she looked more elongated in her ankle-tight jeans and open-collared shirt, with only the flimsiest of scarves covering her. “Oh, Mom, I wish you’d called ahead. Didn’t you know my flight was late?”

  Pru shrugged. “It’ll be good practice for when you’re a doctor. You’ll be keeping people waiting for the rest of your life.”

  As they maneuvered into traffic, a pocket of silence settled over them. “How’s the patient?”

  “It depends when you catch him. Nighttime’s worse.”

  Spence was asleep when they got home, but he must have sensed Sarah’s arrival, because he tilted his head back.

  “Daddy, I’m home.”

&nbs
p; Then he was asleep again, and Pru settled herself in Sarah’s old bedroom, with the Pearl Jam and Soundgarden stickers plastered to the desk, carbon-dating her back to high school.

  “He looks terrible,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t expecting…” But she didn’t know what she’d been expecting. He had become drawn, the hollows of his cheeks like the scooped-out peel of an avocado. “What’s the point of studying medicine if the patient’s living in New York?” Out at UCLA, her professor would point at the screen—at the liver, the pancreas—and she would think, Can’t you just get to the brain?

  “He’ll be better in the morning,” Pru said.

  He was better in the morning—ruddier, haler—and on the subway up to the hospital he was holding forth on the day’s news. He seemed like his old self until, just as suddenly, he didn’t, saying, “Why are we going uptown?” and it was only when Pru reminded him that New York–Presbyterian was uptown that he recovered himself sufficiently to pretend he hadn’t asked the question in the first place.

  In the waiting room, Pru sat with her hands pressed to her pocketbook, as if it were a pet she were trying to keep still. Spence was down the hall, in the bathroom.

  “Dad, are you okay in there?” Sarah said. “Your appointment’s soon.”

  “Go away,” he said. “I’m not coming out.”

  But he emerged a minute later, looking agreeable, the smell of soap on him. “Okay,” he said, “where do I go to humor your mother?”

  They were brought into an office, where a physician assistant directed them to sit. She would be taking Spence’s medical history and giving him the mini–mental state exam. “It won’t be stressful,” she said, but her words produced the very stress they were intended to prevent. It reminded Sarah of the phrase It’s nothing personal, which was always followed by something highly personal and was made more so by the disclaimer.

  Sarah’s mother described Sarah’s father’s medical history. Sarah had seen this in attending rounds; the wives knew more about their husbands’ health than the husbands themselves did. Now her mother was telling the physician assistant that Spence’s parents had had heart disease and cancer, though Spence himself had neither heart disease nor cancer.