The Family Tabor Page 16

  “What does he do?” Elena asks.

  “He’s in logistics. Transportation. Moves big things around the world. Because of him I’ve learned, for instance, that A.P. Moller-Maersk of Denmark, the world’s largest shipping concern, is operating Korean-built container ships called Triple-Es that are longer than the height of the Eiffel Tower, and though such ships carry more containers than anyone considered possible, there are drawbacks. The Triple-Es can sail only between Europe and Asia because their hulls, a hundred and ninety-four feet wide, are too large to fit into American ports, or to slip through the Panama Canal. And they must sail more slowly, cruising at sixteen or eighteen knots, instead of at twenty-two. A typical trip from Poland to China on a Triple-E takes thirty-four days, which apparently is a long time.”

  This is what she decided Aaron Green did, that she researched on her laptop, information she gathered in her notebook, as she sat in her suite at the Bel Onde in Santa Barbara back in February, when Aaron Green was new, when his creation seemed an intelligent way to lure real love into her life. It was overcast that Friday, the ocean wild and flipping over on itself. She had researched and followed links and written it all down, and then she was on the beach, the only person as far as she could see, the fog so soupy it altered perspective, beach and ocean a wedge of pie rather than an endless horizon. Twenty minutes out, the laces of her tennis shoes were tied together, hanging over her shoulder, her feet leaving firm imprints in the cold sand. The pockets of her jeans and her jacket were stuffed with polished black and white rocks the ocean threw out, that dotted the beach, and she remembers wondering when was the last time an educated woman could collect stones in her pockets and not contemplate the life and death of Virginia Woolf. After, she returned to her suite, ordered a bottle of champagne, requested specifically a single glass, and when it was delivered by a young bellman with down-free cheeks, she had tipped him a twenty and seen him out. She poured herself a glass, and on the suite’s deck, under the awning that protected her from the drizzle then falling, she opened one of the books she had brought. Called Fictional Family Life, it was by the famous writer Joan Ashby, whom she’d recently read had abandoned her old life to make a new one in India. The dedication read, Testify to the creation of lives and the requisite heroism in creating one’s own, and Phoebe had shifted nervously in her chair. The stories centered on a damaged boy stuck in his room who invented magical, mystical alter egos, boys his same age, raised dramatically in Colombia, Russia, Turkey, and the Galapagos Islands. When he dreamt, the boy transformed himself into Deo, Abel, Icarus, and Zed, and experienced all of their daring exploits, their fantastical lives he desperately wished for himself. In the beginning, Phoebe’s mouth fell open when she discovered the damaged boy was also named Simon, and she tried superimposing her brother onto this teenage boy, giving him Simon’s face, his voice, but it hadn’t worked, the boy burst through, dispatched her brother, and inhabited all of the neurons, dendrites, and axons in her brain. When she reached the eighth story, she found herself breathless, and she had to calm herself by thinking about mundane things: whether the sun would come out while she was there, whether Benny missed her, whether her assistant had sent the engagement letters to the new clients she had met with the day before. And then her real thoughts, not at all prosaic, leaked from her heart into the damp air: whether she remembered how it felt to fall in love, if she could recall the exact last time she had been touched by someone she loved who loved her, too, aware of the uncomfortable connections the stories were encouraging her to make, between lives unwanted and lives desired, between truth and imagination. When she regained control, she refilled her glass and slipped back into those other lives, reading on and on until she finished the book and the bottle and cried for the damaged boy and for herself, before falling into a very drunken nap on the plush hotel bed.

  “So he must travel a lot,” Elena says wistfully.

  Phoebe knows all about Elena’s rock and hard place. Motherhood eliminated her sister-in-law’s globe-trotting journalism work, an exchange she has told Phoebe she gladly made, and although her children are mostly soul-filling, she would welcome a path back into the world and the work she enjoyed. “Just to get away on my own,” she told Phoebe recently. “With one single bag, returned to the pleasure of solitude, freed from questions about when baby teeth fall out, the difference between slugs and caterpillars, why chicken fingers taste better than the real chicken breasts I make. A span of traveling days when I’m not asked the who, what, when, where, why, and how of whatever is currently Lucy’s obsession, in her mode of conversation, that Isabel is already attempting to copy with her small vocabulary, her short sentences.” Elena now knows why the sky is blue, why grass is green, how flowers grow, but what’s in Phoebe’s mind isn’t her sister-in-law’s conundrum about how a mother can also be a working travel writer, but whether Elena has just given Phoebe a future way to gracefully exit from her Aaron Green relationship. She could blame the failure of their love affair on Aaron’s exhausting travel schedule.

  She nods at Elena.

  “He does. He travels a lot.”

  Everything she needs is in those articles she read.

  “Just since I’ve known him, he’s been to Singapore twice, China once, Indonesia once.”

  “I’ve been to China and Indonesia, but never to Singapore,” Elena says, and Phoebe smiles cheerfully as she deliberately places Elena and her past trips at the conversational center. And then becomes uncomfortably aware of her mother’s eyes upon her. Anxiety grips her. Was her initial assumption right—that Roma accepted her explanation for Aaron’s absence—or wrong, and she’s about to be the object once again of the maternal spotlight? She feels her smile expanding defensively against the coming exposure, but then Roma says, “Elena, is Simon okay? His eyes don’t look right,” and Phoebe’s anxiety dissipates.

  “He’s not sleeping,” Elena says.

  “Is it work? The new partnership?”

  “I don’t think so. He says nothing’s wrong. He had a checkup and everything was fine.”

  Well, he’s not fine, Roma thinks, because he looks like hell.

  When Roma turns her gaze on Camille, Phoebe watches her sister leave their shared stair and wade backwards into the water, smiling and saying, “Mom, I’m great. I’m just fine. Life is peachy. It’s perfect.”

  Under her breath, so quietly that Phoebe barely catches the words, Roma says, “Well, that’s a load of bullshit.” Then Roma’s face closes down and Phoebe can’t find even a hint of what her mother’s thinking about.

  What Roma is thinking about is that already, here at the beginning, she knows she must make private time for each of her children: to talk with Phoebe, because there’s something off in her story about Aaron Green’s absence, and she wonders if perhaps they quarreled, and with Simon, about why he isn’t sleeping, and with Camille, because despite her feverish glow, and her anticipatory, overly bright and vague response to the question that Roma hadn’t even asked, a response that did not refer at all to Valentine, well, that’s a wall Roma needs to carefully demolish, brick by brick.

  “Hey, Mom,” Camille calls out, “remember those homemade popsicles you used to make us?”

  From the middle of the pool, with Isabel sitting on his shoulders, Simon says, “Those were great. I haven’t thought of them in years.”

  “I don’t know why, but on the drive, I was thinking about how we used to gobble them up, three or four at a time, and then take naps. How’d you make them?”

  “You want to know the secret ingredient?” Roma asks, and her children nod. “I made them with the leftover Manischewitz. The Passover wine. Well, except for a little water that I added, they were frozen wine on a stick. I gave them to you when I needed to work and none of you would give me a second of peace.”

  All three of her children stare at her, and Roma starts to laugh. She doesn’t have to read their faces now to figure out what they’re thinking.

  “Please,” sh
e says. “Wipe those looks of horror off your faces. I didn’t inflict any damage on you.”

  “Mom!” her children yell.

  “MOM!” HARRY HEARS HIS children yell.

  And those yells stop him cold as he’s picking his way carefully around the side of the house, desperate not to run into anyone before somehow stapling himself back together. He waits, holding his breath, and when he hears their laughter boil up, he moves quickly, slipping in through the back door.

  The kitchen is empty, and the dining room, and the den, and he peers around the living room wall, relieved that room is empty as well. Through the large windows, he sees them all out by the big pool.

  Lucy is demanding an audience for her dive, Isabel is in a donut his son is swishing back and forth in the water, his daughters and daughter-in-law are arranging towels on the chaises, and his wife, seated on the pool stairs, is wearing the burgundy suit that reveals her fetching curves, bought for their trip to Hawaii last winter. Tall plastic glasses dot the small tables, the large pitcher of Arnold Palmers that Roma adores is nearly empty. He sighs.

  Down the wide sunny halls, into their bedroom, where the sun has lit up all of their art, has turned their bed into a bright white cloud, where he wishes he could be, hiding beneath the soft duvet. He shuts the door quietly and debates locking it, but they haven’t locked their door since they wanted private time when the children were young.

  Through the bedroom to the bathroom, where he extracts the tuxedo from its black bag, tries to avoid looking at it when he hangs it in his closet, tries to avoid feeling the richness of the fabric, pulls out his swim trunks from the shelf above the hidden, heavy-duty safe, and slides the closet door closed. Roma is always after to him to close his closet door, always saying, “How hard is it, Harry, to close that damn door completely, it takes a second, so why can’t you do it?” and now, finally, on this day of all days, he’s done it, and vows he will keep doing it, satisfy this smallest of requests from his wife, who has carried the knowledge of what he himself did not remember until today.

  Under the hard shower spray, he stands with his head down, his hands against the marble walls, the water smacking his head, his tight shoulders, his back newly bowed. He is a frozen man in the hot desert in a steaming shower, and he does not move until he clears his mind of the bad things he has done, that he remembers he has done, until he feels, not like himself, he knows those days are gone, but like a man who can paste a convincing smile on his face and welcome his children and his grandchildren, hug them all, and do what he always does with Roma when they’ve been apart for even an hour, which is to kiss her hard on her lips and say, “I love you.”

  He dries off and steps into his swim trunks, brushes his wet hair, inhales deeply, then stares at himself in the mirror. He pushes the corners of his mouth up with his hands, opens his eyes wide, waits until he manages to pull a twinkle down into them.

  Then he is beyond the safety of the bathroom, and of the closed-door bedroom, is at the massive sliding glass doors in the living room, stepping out onto the sunbaked concrete, the aquamarine pool as inviting as an oasis, a mirage, calling out, “Welcome, welcome. It’s wonderful to see everybody.”

  That’s what he says, while in his head, in that dry voice from the court, he hears again, In the beginning. That biblical opening that spun him into a dark world.

  Then his daughters are surrounding him, hugging him, Phoebe saying, “Hail to our conquering hero,” and Camille saying, “You must be on top of the world,” and it takes every ounce of his strength to keep his smile large and real, to mouth to Roma, “I love you.”

  He wishes she already knew everything he experienced this morning, but his wife’s intelligent eyes hold none of that knowledge. Her eyes are bright and clear, the happiness within them uncensored and unclouded, happiness reflected in the strength of her smile, and she mouths back, “I love you, too.”

  When he feels tears pricking his eyes, tears he would not be able to rationally explain, he pulls free of his daughters, and leaps into the pool, tucking his head down, grabbing his knees with his arms, executing a cannonball, which he has never ever done before, not once in his life, displacing the blue water so thoroughly that his granddaughters are swamped by his wave, nearly going under, both kicking their legs hard and reaching out their arms to be saved. And when they are, their eyes are round and amazed watching their sabba below the surface, seemingly sitting on the bottom of the pool, and Lucy begins counting, “One, two, three, four, five, six …” and her numbers keep ringing out as her father, mother, grandmother, and aunts come together in a tight watery circle, Lucy and Isabel smack in the middle, everyone smiling, everyone looking down, waiting for the patriarch to rise.

  EMPIRE OF KNOWLEDGE

  NINETEEN

  ALL OF THE TABORS frolicked in the pool. They played Marco Polo and Atomic Whirl and Octopus. Harry played Whale with the little ones, giving them round-trips on his back, from shallow end to deep. Lucy showed everyone how she swam the crawl—arms akimbo; the breaststroke—head retracted like a turtle, legs twitchy as a frog’s; then called, “Sabba, Sabba, Sabba, looklooklook,” to prove she could even swim staring straight at the big sun. Isabel, balanced atop Harry’s shoulders, shrieked with delight each time he yelled “Ooomgaawah,” before tossing her into the water and scooping her right up. He hung onto the side of the pool with his daughters, the three of them kicking their feet, sending up a huge spray that came down on the others in a rainbow of wet beads. He and Simon competed to see who could swim the longest without coming up for air, Simon beating him handily, five laps without taking a breath, throwing his arms up in triumph, yelling, “It’s all the running I’ve been doing.” Harry took Roma in his arms and she asked how his tennis went, if his string of unbroken victories remained intact, kissed him when he said he and Levitt had hung it up for the day, left the match unfinished until next week. She asked after Luigi and he said the tailor was his usual happy self. And when she said, “Are you excited about tonight,” he pinched her rear to make her laugh and then swam a few hard laps, veering around his family as if they were buoys.

  EVERYONE IS NOW IN dry bathing suits, shorts and shirts and sundresses, lunch set out on the long wooden table by the pool, and Harry is at the head, surrounded by those he loves, by those who love him because they think he is still the man he has always been, because they do not yet know he is no longer, has never been, that man.

  His years of marriage to Roma have familiarized him with many of the psychological states her unnamed patients experience, including that of dissociation, a detachment from reality, a mind splitting free from the body, that can range from mild to pathological. Never once has he experienced such himself, at least not that he knows, but he is now, and he understands his mind is attempting to cope, seeking a mechanism, a defense to minimize the horrendous things he’s learned, thus far, this day. Watching Simon loosening the cork on the prosecco, Harry feels himself rising, drifting up in the hot air, looking down at the wet heads of his family as they talk, laugh, turn their happy faces to where his body still sits in the chair, aiming smiles his way, full of pleasure and delight. The popping of the cork, the wine bubbling and spilling over the green glass of the bottle, yanks him down from the blue sky, tethers him firmly to his seat.

  “Dad,” Simon says, and Harry holds up a plastic flute for the golden liquid that fizzes in the sunlight, and he is utterly bereft, even as he’s telling himself he can do this, be the father and husband they know. That he must, for them.

  When the glasses are filled, Roma stands and waits for quiet. “This morning, I was trying to think of words that would capture my emotions, but none seemed to fit, none seemed important enough. So I’ll simply say how proud I am of you, how proud we all are, how this award could not be bestowed on a more deserving man. Harry Tabor, you are a man among men. I love you with every ounce of my being.”

  There are cheers and calls for Harry to make a speech, and he sits with a smile on
his face and his heart breaking, incapable of any utterance, and then Lucy stands and says, “Sabba, you’re supposed to say something, something, something,” and the laughter allows the moment to pass and all he can do is lift his glass higher, sweep his unseeing eyes around the table, and hope the gesture suffices. And it must, because then lunch is under way.

  Dishes are passed; plates are filled. Lucy refuses anything from the fruit bowl. Isabel gestures to Elena’s glass and then points to herself, and Roma hands over an empty flute, which Elena fills with a little water, and Isabel scuttles off her seat and goes around the table, insisting everyone clink their glasses against hers.

  Conversations begin, and the Tabors, a quick-talking family, speak rapidly, and Harry, who can’t put a morsel of food into his mouth, focuses on trying to listen. Relieved when he can do that, listen intently, although he is incapable of offering anything up.

  Phoebe is asking Simon how it’s going for him as a new partner at his firm, and he begins filling her in on the specifics, that he’s working even more, not less, and Harry is impressed that his eldest refrains from telling his youngest what she really thinks about the choice he has made, thoughts she has previously, confidentially relayed to Harry, but then she doesn’t stay quiet, says, “I think you made a big mistake not coming over to my firm. Your partner pay is less than what you’d be making at my shop, and I would have gladly changed the name to Tabor & Tabor, or the Tabor Firm, or even Tabor Squared, if that’s what you wanted.”

  Simon reaches for the prosecco, finds the bottle empty, reaches for the second one perspiring on the table, pops the cork, refills his glass, drinks, and only then does he say to his sister, “Right now we love each other, but if we were working together, who knows what would happen. Did you want to take the risk we’d end up hating each other, barely remembering we’re sister and brother, consumed instead only by firm business? And we don’t really do things the same way. If we were partners, I’d suggest no longer accepting paintings by clients who can’t pay their bills. I would tell you it sets a lousy precedent. That people have to pay for the expertise they want.”