Days of Awe Read online

  “A meal in a muffin,” he says, biting it. “It’s perfect.”

  In front of them, a woman is stepping out of her shorts. One side of her bathing suit is unceremoniously wedged in the crack of her ass; she pulls it out with a loud snap. Her rear end is what Sandy calls “coagulated,” a cottage cheese of cellulite, and, below it, spider veins explode down her legs like fireworks.

  “Do you ever look at something like that and think about how you could fix it?” Terri asks.

  “The interesting thing is that the woman doesn’t seem bothered by it. The people who come to me are bothered by their bodies. They don’t go to the beach and disrobe in public. They come into my office with a list of what they want fixed—like it’s a scratch-and-dent shop.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t realize how bad it looks?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “And maybe that’s okay.” He thinks about Botox and Restylane and lasering spider veins and resurfacing a face, and sometimes he feels like a conservator, like the guy he once sat next to at a dinner who worked at the Met, touching up artworks when they chipped or when the ceiling leaked on them.

  He thinks about the time he volunteered to go on a mission with a group of doctors who were heading to an impoverished spot to do good for five days—a kind of spiritual recompense for the fortune that modern elective cosmetic procedures had brought them. He fixed cleft palates, treated skin rashes, gave routine immunizations. “I’ve heard of it,” his mother said. “What’s it called again, Doctors Without Licenses? Maybe next time you could take Roger—he’s an excellent dentist. Everyone needs a good dentist, rich or poor. It would be nice if the two of you did something together.”

  “Do you think he’d rather play tennis?” the friend asks. “Would it be more fun for Roger to play a round-robin or go out on the boat?”

  “I have no idea,” he says. “I’m not Roger.”

  “He always gets like this when his brother comes,” Sandy says.

  “Since I was five, Roger has been stealing my friends.”

  “Your friends are nice to him because he’s your brother. Roger can’t steal them.”

  “Roger thinks they’re his friends. He tells everyone that he was the favorite, that I was an afterthought, an accident.”

  “Were you?” someone asks.

  “All you have to do is get through it,” Sandy says. “It’ll be over soon.”

  “Not soon enough,” he says.

  “You have nice friends. Who wouldn’t want them?” the visiting sister says. As she rolls over, her top drops off. His eyes are reflexively drawn in—her nipples are large and brown, more beautiful than he would have imagined.

  “Hey, there.” A booming voice goes off like a bomb in his head—Roger. “I thought I’d find all you flabby asses here. If it’s Sunday, they must be at the beach.” Roger smiles, his hundred-thousand-dollar smile. Click. Tom catches the poppy seeds at the gum line. Click. He’s got Roger’s pink shorts with embroidered martini glasses. Click. Roger is wearing crocodile tassel loafers. “Tommy, can you put the fucking camera down and actually say hello?”

  “Hello. Are you on your own? We thought maybe you’d bring what’s-her-name, your hygienist? We were just talking about her.”

  “She’s got her kids this weekend. Twins.”

  “Roger, come sit next to me.” Sandy gives her chair to Roger and pours him a drink.

  “Breakfast of champions,” Roger says, sipping the mimosa.

  “We were wondering when you’d get here,” Tom says.

  “I stopped to hit a bucket of balls. Oh, God,” Roger says, “isn’t that Blarney Stone?”

  “Who is Blarney Stone?” the visiting sister asks.

  “That rock star—is that his real name?” someone says.

  “Yeah, I think it is,” he says, and now they’re all squinting and staring at an exceptionally pale, skinny figure in a form-fitting swimsuit.

  “That suit must have been made for him,” Terri says.

  “As skinny as he is, he’s still got a little paunch,” Roger says. “Do you remember how Dad used to do a thousand sit-ups every morning in his underwear?”

  “It wasn’t a thousand, more like a hundred.”

  “Whatever. He thought of himself as a perfect specimen.”

  “Yes. And Mom used to say, ‘Your father is a beautiful man.’ It gave me the creeps.” Tom puts his camera back in the bag.

  “What do you make of that guy?” Roger points to someone farther along the beach.

  “Don’t point,” Tom says, horrified.

  “Poliosis,” Roger says.

  “Actually, that’s piebaldism—dark and light patches on the skin. Poliosis is the white forelock.”

  “Like Susan Sontag,” the friend’s sister says.

  “Roger, what appeals—boat or tennis?” the friend asks.

  “I don’t know. Tom-Tom, what do you think?”

  “Boat,” Tom says.

  “If brother says boat, I go with tennis. A word to the wise: Never do what brother says.” Roger laughs alone.

  Tom stands. “I’ve got a headache. I need to go home. Go on the boat—the water looks rough, it’ll be exciting—and I’ll see you later.”

  “Should I come home with you?” Sandy asks. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s just a headache from the champagne. I don’t usually drink at breakfast.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Sandy says.

  “Don’t,” he says firmly, hating her because he knows she doubts that the headache is legitimate. “I’ll see you later. We’re all set for dinner?”

  “All set,” Roger says. “I made the reservation myself.”

  Later Tom and Sandy argue about it.

  “Of course I knew your headache was real. I offered to leave with you.”

  “You offered to leave because it was the thing to do in front of the others, but you didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m not doing this,” Sandy says. “I can’t prove that I meant what I said. You should take me at my word.”

  “You think I’m faking a headache because Roger is here, but you’re the one who brought champagne to the beach. Who does that? Who pours people drinks at eleven in the morning when everyone is just sitting there baking in the sun?”

  “Now you’re blaming me for your headache,” Sandy says. “Next you’ll say that I tried to poison you.”

  Roger knocks on their bedroom door. “Excuse me,” he says, knowing all too well that his timing is lousy. “I forgot my floss. Can you imagine that, a dentist forgetting his floss? Have you got some I could use?”

  “No,” Tom says.

  Sandy goes into the bathroom and returns with floss.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Roger says.

  “No problem,” she says. Roger leaves the room. “Can we just stop for now? Let’s just get ready for dinner.”

  “Nice that Roger picked the best place in town. Is he paying?”

  “I have no idea,” Sandy says.

  “Do me a favor and don’t do that thing where you order two appetizers and then I get stuck paying the same as if you’d ordered a rack of lamb.”

  “Am I supposed to order something I don’t want?”

  “In this case yes. Order something special, treat yourself. Have the fish.”

  “Why don’t you just order two main courses? Instead of getting a starter, why don’t you just leap right in and have a fish and a steak?”

  “Because people would notice. They’d say, ‘Oh, you should pay more, you ate double.’ They never notice when you eat less.”

  “This is the least of your problems,” she says, spraying herself with perfume.

  Tom sits on the other side of the table, leaving Roger to the friends. When the waiter offers them the wine list, Roger takes it, studying carefully.

  “See something appealing?” Sandy asks.

  “The wine list is mediocre at best,” Roger says, “but I’ll find something. That’s the true test, finding quality where there is none.”

  At the table next to them, an old couple are having dinner with their adult child; the couple are in their eighties and refer to each other as Mommy and Daddy.

  “Daddy, what are you going to have?”

  “I don’t know, Mommy. How about you?”

  “I’ll have the snapper,” the son, who must be sixty, says.

  “I’ll go with the sole, as long as it’s not soaking in butter—it’s not soaking, is it?” Mommy asks the waiter.

  “It’s perfect for you,” the waiter says.

  After the first course, Tom gets up to go to the men’s room; one of his friends follows him. Here we go again, he thinks, imagining that the friend is going to show him something—a fungus between his toes, a ditzel on his chest. He doesn’t turn around.

  When they are side by side at the urinals, the friend says, “I’m leaving Terri.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tom says, genuinely shocked.

  “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m miserable.”

  “Is it because of the cancer?”

  The friend shakes his head no. “Everyone will think that’s why, but it has nothing to do with it. I was going to leave last year, before she got sick.”

  “Did you meet someone?”

  “Yes, but that’s not why.”

  “It’s always why. Men don’t leave unless they’ve met someone.”

  He shrugs. “Terri doesn’t know.”

  “About the other woman?”

  “About anything. I’m telling you first. I d
on’t know what to say to her. We’ve been married for twenty-six years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “She’ll be fine,” he says, “once she gets over the initial shock.”

  At the sink Tom checks his face in the mirror. “When are you going to tell her?” he asks, watching himself talking.

  “I don’t know,” the friend says. “Please don’t tell Sandy. The girls can’t keep a secret.”

  “Not a word.”

  And they go back to the table.

  “Everything okay?” Sandy asks.

  “Wonderful,” he says, reaching for the wine.

  “If you have a headache, maybe you shouldn’t drink,” she says.

  “Trust me, I need a drink.”

  At the end of the meal, at the table next to them, Daddy is asleep. He has basically fallen asleep in his scallops, a dot of sour cream on his tie.

  “Daddy,” his wife says, waking him. “Do you want some dessert?”

  His head lifts, as if he had only been looking for his napkin under the table. “Do they have vanilla ice cream?” he asks.

  “We do,” the waiter says.

  “And what do they get for that?” Daddy asks.

  “Six-fifty,” Mommy says, looking at her menu.

  “I’ll have it at home,” Daddy says.

  And the son says to the waiter, “We’ll take the check.”

  Roger pays for dinner, and they all thank him.

  “You didn’t have to,” Sandy says.

  “I know I didn’t.”

  “You can buy them dinner, but you can’t buy their friendship,” Tom hisses into Roger’s ear.

  “Shall I drive?” Sandy asks.

  “I’ll drive,” Tom says.

  “You drank,” she says.

  “Not so much.”

  “Enough,” she says, taking the keys.

  Back at the house, Tom and Roger are having a drink in the living room, a nightcap and a cigar. Sandy excuses herself for a moment, and when she comes back, the brothers are on the sofa, pummeling each other.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  Neither says a word.

  What happened was that Roger said something like, “Really too bad about Sandy. She used to be such a looker.”

  And, not sure that he was hearing it right, Tom said, “What do you mean?”

  And Roger said, “Well, you know, she’s let herself go, and I imagine that for someone like you it must be depressing. I never was all about a great figure or a pretty face. As you know, for me it’s the smile—they’ve got to have the smile.”

  “I think you should leave,” Tom says.

  “Well, that would be awkward, wouldn’t it?” Roger says.

  “Not really.”

  “If I leave, I’m not coming back—ever,” Roger says.

  Tom is giddy with the idea but says nothing.

  “When Mom hears about this, she’s going to be very angry,” Roger says.

  “You’re fifty-three years old and still threatening to tell Mom?” Tom says.

  “Fine, you little fucker, how about I call your friend Bobby and tell him I can’t go on the boat tomorrow because you kicked me out of the house? And I’ll call your other friend and tell him you were staring at his wife’s one boob.”

  And, with that, Sandy says, “Get him,” and Tom punches Roger. “You ungrateful little son of a . . .”

  “Butcher and an artist,” Roger says.

  Whose Story Is It, and Why Is It Always on Her Mind?

  She is seeing the doctor now; it was a condition of her release.

  “The thorns?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. Having plucked them from rose stems, she drove the thorns deep into her skin, pressing them like shark’s teeth, in a line up and down her arms. She pressed the thorns into her skin until the skin gave way and buried the thorn. And then she took off her shoes and pushed the thorns into her feet and walked from park to park, carefully collecting more thorns—“specimens,” she called them. Her wounds became infected, the infection spread into her blood.

  “We almost lost you,” her mother said.

  “I was right here the whole time, hiding in plain sight.”

  “I see you are walking with a limp,” the doctor says.

  “I am treading lightly.”

  “Why thorns?”

  “It runs in the family.”

  She glances over her shoulder to see if the doctor is listening and catches him off guard.

  Their eyes meet, and she looks away.

  * * *

  —

  “Continue,” the doctor says.

  She lies back; her fingers stroke the deep blue fabric on the doctor’s couch.

  “My mother rearranges the furniture constantly. She is trying to re-create something that she remembers, but I’m not sure it ever really happened. She says she is getting closer. She is no longer young, but she gathers the energy to push the sofa around the room. And when she is done, she cries. It will never be the same again. It is always almost there, but not quite. She can’t put her finger on it—the light, the silence? Every day she tries a new combination, hoping the pieces will fall into place like the pin tumblers of a lock, hoping that there will be an opening and something will be revealed or recovered. ‘Where are you going with that?’ I ask as she moves a lamp from this table to that. ‘I am going back to where I came from,’ she says. ‘But it does not exist,’ I say. She makes still lifes, tableaux of how she wishes it were. ‘Is it the same sofa—the one from before?’ she asks me, now confused. ‘That’s what you’ve always told me.’ ‘I don’t know anymore,’ she says. ‘Maybe it came after the fact.’ She calls the war ‘the fact.’ My mother’s sofa is also blue.”

  Finished for today, she gets up carefully.

  * * *

  —

  The next time she visits the doctor, she notices a hair. She sees it as she is approaching the doctor’s couch, a blond hair like a golden thread, glinting in the light. She doesn’t know what to do—pick it up, stretch it between her fingers and pluck it like a harp string? She imagines winding it round and round a finger until the finger turns blue, pressing it against her neck like a fine gold wire. What to do? She pretends not to see it. She lies down on it—the blond hair beneath her own brown hair, the blond hair becoming for the time a part of her. But she can’t bear it. Whose hair is it? Does the doctor have sex on the sofa?

  “My mother was born the day before the war ended. She was a girl without a father, a miracle. For a long time, she believed that—we all did. The fact is, during the war my grandmother was left at a Catholic boarding school. Her parents brought her there in the middle of the night, turned their backs and left. As she screamed for them, the nuns held their hands over her mouth. The way the story goes—he appeared in the garden behind the school. She pretended not to know what happened—but it’s possible she really didn’t know. It was a war. She was terrified they would die. The only thing that kept her sane was that the roses went on blooming. That’s where they found her—entangled in the rosebushes, pinned by the spindly arms of the prickly vines. He came into the garden, bent to smell the roses, and saw her. He pushed her into the roses. When he was gone, she remained trapped. She lay in the garden all night. She watched the sky grow dark, the stars come out. She looked up into the blue, the eternal, the unending, and the unnamable. She was asleep when they found her. Grandmother woke up, but only partially, it was as if she were under a spell, in a fog. We thought she would come out from under, but mostly she seemed baffled, like it all just didn’t make sense. As a child my mother knew that her mother hated her, but she didn’t know why or what she had done wrong. My mother kept herself hidden, in boxes or under the table, inside closets. She would pretend she was invisible. Later she would hide in the woods, behind trees, or in piles of leaves. She would play chameleon and practice shifting her skin to match the environment. When other children came to play, my mother would hide, and only after they left would she rush to the window, press her face to the glass, and look at them leaving. My mother found out when she was about thirteen; she doesn’t remember how, but she said it explained a lot. When she found out, she went on a nighttime rampage through all the parks of London and cut the roses. She brought back hundreds of roses. She filled my grandmother’s house with roses from bud to bloom to past their prime—cabbage rose, common rose, tea rose—each with delicate petals like human flesh, each with a perfume, a beautiful scent turned putrid. The theft of roses was a crime; the roses belonged to the city, to the people, and they were not for the benefit of just one. The story of the theft made all the papers. Her mother was horrified and threatened to turn her daughter over to the authorities. ‘I can’t have this. It is too much. You are doing it to me again. You are just like your father. You are the proof that you can’t escape your history.’ And together they cut the roses and their long, thorny stems into tiny little pieces and boiled them down.” She pauses. “Does anyone have a life of their own?” she asks the doctor.