Hannah looked up from her plate. Groff turned his hand palm up.
“You have a big date?” Hannah said.
“That isn’t funny.”
“If you’re just going to the Kleins’, why can’t I come?”
“It’s late. It’s already late.”
Gila was hardly listening. She was thinking things through. For example, neither Groff nor Hannah knew she had quit her job at the temple that afternoon. She thought of Hannah’s face in the classroom — that poise, older than Hannah’s age — and wondered how much Hannah suspected.
Groff looked at her, his eyes seeing her but also denying everything about her that wasn’t relevant to this particular moment. “I won’t be long,” he said. “There’s a movie player — Hannah can show you how it works. I don’t know what there is — old tennis matches — Wimbledon. You won’t want to watch that, but there are movies. Hannah will show you.”
He bit into the crust of his pizza, hungrily chewing. The way he ate was so unself-conscious that the room became calmer.
A desk, a bed, a mat on the floor, a dresser with broken handles so that she left the drawers partly opened — this was how Gila lived in Manhattan now. Outside, the city withered, food wrappers and empty cans in an abandoned station wagon, the local shop displaying soap and toothpaste. Her building belonged to a congregant at the temple, that was why the rent was low. She could hear other people’s TVs in the airshaft as she tried to sleep. At first, she’d felt obliged to go to services, sitting there before the cantor’s modal gloom, the loud seconding of the organ, Rabbi Lehman circulating the undressed Torah to the nearly empty pews. They treated her like some sort of wraith, someone foreign to have opinions about.
Not long after he’d hired her, Groff had given her a gift from his shop that hung on the wall of her apartment now, a framed poster from the 1930s, the glass cloudy, the image a hazy black and white. At the bottom was the name Elsa Schiaparelli, the designer, who was posed in profile, her hands clasped casually over the arm of a gilt chair, black hair knotted at one side, a white gown falling off one shoulder in a cowl of fabric cut like feathers. At the top, in pink letters, was the single word Shocking! She had mentioned to him once that she’d wanted to be a designer. He’d remembered.
“It must be worth something,” she said.
“Not really,” he answered. “Not much. These things just accumulate. Don’t take it if you don’t like it.”
He was still holding it against his hip.
“I used to make drawings,” she said. “Schiaparelli. Chanel. I used to dream about those things, even when I was a little girl. Even when I was younger than Hannah.”
He put the poster down on the counter and looked at her. He seemed on the verge of probing for more, then she could see him decide not to.
“Fine, good,” he said. “Then it’s yours.”
He came back a little after ten, moving in the lamplight with a tight chest, not looking too much at anything. Mona’s things, his things — the Turkish rug, rose colored, the worn sofas, the end tables with their stacks of magazines. The sunroom lay beyond it, its windows on the pond a lustrous black. In the kitchen, he found an old bottle of rum and poured some into a glass with some ice, the Haitian kind he liked, Barbancourt. He wished he could have stayed at the Kleins’, the candles burning over the two different hearths, the women in their sweaters and jeans and high boots, food all around, the different wines. Harry Klein sold commercial real estate. He did impressions and told obscene jokes, even racist jokes, and he read Anna Karenina every year. Mona had liked to help him prune the fruit trees on the side of his property each March, standing on the ladder with her long streaked hair blowing in her eyes, her rag wool gloves.
She’d been a photographer, known in a modest way for portraits of criminals in the documentary style of Robert Frank. In the city’s interrogation rooms, the police would set up a clock beside their suspects to serve as a time marker during their videotaped statements. Mona’s photographs showed these suspects, black or Hispanic usually, listless or defiant or in tears, always with that clock in the frame, its pointing hands.
Metastasis — the liver, the lungs, even the brain. There was the wait while they hydrated her, the wait while they ran the bloodwork, the wait while they brought her to the chair and ran the chemo, the wait in the office. People magazine, Car and Driver, Highlights. The wait in the bedroom while she prepared herself to come back out after a bath, her hair gone, even her eyebrows, her face somehow naked, scalded. One time he’d asked her how she felt and she’d said, “I’m scared,” and it was like the only honest thing he’d ever heard. There was nothing that could prepare you for how it felt, the tubes in her bruised arm, the EKG, the paper gown, Mona so emaciated she seemed half her size, as if she wasn’t anyone in particular anymore, or as if the machines were there for the simple purpose of stealing her identity.
He switched off the lamp and stood for a while in the living room. Hours would pass, he wouldn’t sleep, he knew it already. The furnace ticked erratically in the walls, then came on with a low muffled whoosh. The loss felt more like fear now. It came at him backwards. What he feared had already happened. When he turned off the light in the hallway, the darkness was a thickness, a presence in the air. He opened his eyes and it was no different from having them closed. The city was never dark in that way. It was a darkness you breathed.
He switched the light back on and saw the bedroom down the hall where Gila was. His resolve rose and then waned in a way that was dizzying — he imagined it happening and then it happened. It had happened before. He went ahead and approached her door absently, his fingers resting for a moment on the glass knob. He paused as if about to knock, then thought about the noise and instead he slowly opened it, stepping forward like a wary child. She turned in bed with an intake of breath. She had fallen asleep with a magazine on the blanket beside her. The smell of her sleep filled the room. It was impossible to do this with any grace.
“I still have a few things to learn,” he said.
She rubbed her eyes, then switched on the bedside lamp. “Like what?” she said.
“Lots of things. How to live without scruples.”
She turned away and he moved farther into the room, sitting in a little chair by the door in his overcoat.
“I quit my job,” she said.
“When?”
“This afternoon. I can’t do it anymore. It was time.”
She wanted to open a store — women’s clothes, evening wear. He had promised once he would help her. This was what she was really saying.
“I was hoping Hannah would learn Hebrew,” he said, his eyes closed. “They teach her French in school — nice, fine — but what does it really have to do with anything, French?”
“It’s a nice house you have. A nice life.”
“This was the room she fussed over. The guest room. I never understood why. People coming to visit. Endless.”
He brought his hand back to his shoulder and massaged it. She was looking at the magazine now, one of Mona’s, Aperture. The lamp, the window valances, the sleigh bed from the shop in East Hampton.
“I thought we’d go on the boat tomorrow with the Kleins,” he said.
“You go.”
“You’ll stay here and read my wife’s magazines.”
“I don’t like boats. I also don’t like playing games.”
“Of course you do.”