The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 2

  So, it was during Mostly Musical Shabbat, during a Calypso version of Adon Olam, on the occasion of the observed anniversary of the death of a brother-in-law whom he’d never met, while staring at a stained glass depiction of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt that recalled nothing so much as a Saturday-morning, Hanna-Barbera cartoon, that God spoke to Abbie Mayer for the very first time. Of course, God doesn’t speak; it’s as silly to imag-ine the Lord uttering actual words as it is to imagine that, because we are made in God’s image, He therefore resembles in some actual, physical way, a human being. As we are, body and soul, afterimages of the totality and universality of the divine, frozen, sub-photographic images of a vastness of being that is and moves, so too is our language less even than an echo of the primordial verb of existence. God, Abbie learned, doesn’t speak to men at all but rather puts into their minds and hearts the knowledge of and belief in that which He would—if He did, if He even could, speak—have said.

  • • •

  After the service, they stood on the front steps of the temple in the quick spring twilight until Abbie, feeling oddly ravenous, though not as generally discombobulated as he would have expected if you’d told him earlier in the day that he’d receive a vision from God, asked if anyone was hungry and suggested an Italian place on the next block that he knew they all liked. It was an Italian restaurant as they used to be, unconcerned with faddish authenticity, the sort of place where you could still get lasagna and garlic bread and where the waiters all sounded like a swim in the waves off the shore in Jersey was the closest they’d ever got to Italy. The sun was still higher than the buildings but sinking swiftly, and something about the quality of its light suggested reflection off the water, although you certainly couldn’t see the river from there. Abbie disapproved of the neighborhood’s sometimes slavishly historic architecture, but he approved of its lowness. He’d never designed a skyscraper. Twelve stories was the maximum decent height for human habitation. It was a question of scale. New York’s immensity appealed to him, but not its height. He took Sarah’s hand, and she let it hang limply in his for a minute before sliding it out of his grip and shaking it as if she’d touched something wet and unpleasant before shoving it into the pocket of her coat. Abbie gave her an inquiring look, but she stared at the ground. But she was always upset after this service, so he turned back to his in-laws and said, “So, what do you think?”

  As was her habit, Susan Lieberman said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m really in the mood to sit in a restaurant,” and her husband said, “Well, come on, Sue. We should eat something.” Susan shrugged helplessly and said as long as there wasn’t a wait. There was never a wait. Herman talked about real estate. He’d been retired for almost five years by then but still spoke about it as if he were always in the middle of the next big deal.

  “The gays,” he told Abbie. “That’s how I know.”

  “The gays?” Abbie repeated. He’d been trying to get Sarah to look at him to no avail; she was embroiled in a quiet sidebar with her mother. That wasn’t necessarily unusual, but he could tell that she was upset with him, and, as was his habit, he found himself echoing his father-in-law’s phrases as a proxy for actually conversing, which fortunately suited Herman just fine. He let his mind file through the inventory of recent sins that Sarah may or may not have discovered—there is, after all, no one so paranoid as a man who makes a habit of lying, if only by omission, to his wife; those normal moments of distance or distraction in a marriage, which a policy of general honesty would render as innocuous as they are inevitable, become, each of them, immensely significant, indicative of some tear in the veil of secrets.

  “The gays,” Herman was saying, “That’s right. I always say, it’s a good thing I’m not a prejudiced man. Well, you know, my grandfather was in the theater, not an actor of course, but in the business, so we always knew all kinds in my family and said, live and let live. And for a man in real estate, the gays are the bellwether. If they’re moving in, you can be sure that prices are going up, up, and up. That’s how I knew to buy downtown, and as you know, it worked out well for me.”

  “Yes,” Abbie said. “That’s a good policy.”

  “You ought to buy downtown, Abbie. A man of your interests? One of these lofts. Can you believe it?” He chewed his scampi. “Lofts,” he repeated.

  “Sarah likes it here,” Abbie replied. He found that invoking Sarah’s tastes was a prophylactic against his father-in-law’s advice. He sent a pleading look in her direction, but she was still embroiled with her mother.

  “And tell me, Abbie, what are you working on these days?”

  “Oh,” Abbie wrenched himself away from the side of Sarah’s head. “Oh, lighting mostly.”

  “Lighting? Do you do that as well? Don’t your electricians or what have you do that sort of thing? After you design the, the building and so forth.”

  “Well, an architect doesn’t so much design buildings as he solves problems,” Abbie said. “Anyway, very interesting new technologies in lighting. Fluorescents, actually.”

  “Fluorescents! No thank you. Like prisons and cafeterias.”

  “Well—” Abbie started to say.

  “Not for me,” said Herman, and that was clearly the end of it.

  Herman and Susan walked home after dinner, and Abbie and Sarah shared a silent cab to their apartment several blocks farther north. “A nice doorman building on West End Avenue.” He could still hear the voice of their broker, who’d hustled them through a series of catastrophes that she must have staged as a sales tactic before ushering them past a uniformed Russian man with huge shoulders and a mismatched, delicate face to the brass elevators and into their new home. “Well,” she’d said, whatever her name was. Abbie remembered her voice, but not her name. No, Myrna, that was her name. She was in her sixties and sounded distantly like the Bronx, although she’d polished the rough edges into something more generically New-York career-woman. She wore all black and had large, but tasteful, jewelry. “Well,” she said again, and she stood there nodding. They couldn’t say no. It was too big and much too traditional. It had wainscoting and radiators. None of their furniture would match. He said as much to Sarah after they’d already said yes. “You’ll rise to the challenge, I’m sure,” she told him.

  Sarah disappeared into their bedroom as soon as they were inside, and Abbie poured himself a scotch and went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. The balcony, that detail he liked. He’d quit smoking years ago, but kept a pack in the freezer and still indulged from time to time in the evening, or when he’d had quite a lot to drink. He took a drag of the cigarette and traced a dollar sign in the dark air and laughed at himself. “That’s a little architect’s joke,” he said. If you looked between the buildings, you could catch sight of the dark expanse of the Park: that carefully constructed fantasy of how the island had been before there was a city there.

  He reflected on his experience—well, that was the wrong word, but it would have to do until he could come up with a better euphemism—in the temple. Rationally, of course, it would have been a confabulation, a daydream, albeit a startlingly visceral one. It comported, after all, very closely with a train of thought he’d lately been toying with without permitting himself seriously to commit to considering it: leaving New York. His sister, Veronica, had suggested it; he’d called her to ask her advice about Cathy, the woman he’d been seeing, but when Veronica had asked him if he was calling to talk to her about “that woman,” he’d become angry—not so much because she called her “that woman” but more because she’d intuited his purpose before he could reveal it, and it made him feel like the lesser intellect. That pained him acutely, because if his sister was, by the crudest economic measures, more successful than him, he comforted himself with the fact that he was smarter.

  As children, they’d been very close; she’d protected her dreamy, artistic sibling by carrying the weight of their parents’ absurd expectations on the strength of her intellig
ence and limitless talents—a musician, a dancer, an artist, an athlete—and then, later, he’d returned the favor a thousandfold when their father had discovered Veronica’s first real girlfriend and reacted very badly. Saul Mayer lacked Herman Lieberman’s essential libertinism. Herman had had mistresses over the years, which Susan had always tolerated, later confessing to her college-age daughter that, after Elliot was born, their marriage had cooled, passion settling into a deeper, if less physical, sort of friendship. “But it sounds terrible!” Sarah said. “He was exploiting you!”

  “On the contrary, honey. I’ve had my fun too!”

  Saul Mayer did not cheat on his wife, nor had they settled into an amicable intellectual companionship. He’d persisted in a state of faithful matrimonial anxiety until his wife, only sixty-two at the time, had passed away. To discover that his daughter was a lesbian was too much for him. But even as a stoned college kid, Abbie had viewed the world with an inconsistent but utterly unbending moralism, and the study of architecture had given him a Masonic presumptuousness about his own mental superiority over most other people, his father certainly included. This would later harden into a less redeemable condescension, but only later—and he’d been a rock against which their father’s anger and opprobrium crashed but which it couldn’t erode. “It seems to me,” Veronica could still hear him saying, languid and probably high, “that the question of whom a person loves is very much secondary to the simple fact that a person loves.” Her father had screamed back that it wasn’t natural. Abbie had shrugged: “A townhouse in a city of ten million people is natural? Coal-fired electricity is natural? Glass windows are natural? Cars and subways are natural? What’s natural? Besides love, what is there but artifice?” This argument hadn’t worked on their father, who passed the rest of his life very rarely speaking to his daughter, and if he did, whenever possible, only through the intermediary of his son, but it had worked on Veronica, cementing permanently her sororal loyalty. In the two decades since, Abbie had frequently tested that permanence, but she did what she could, when he let her.

  He’d called, as always, at the most inopportune time, and she’d just hoped he wasn’t calling—again—to talk about his stupid affair. She’d always found men to be fatuously moralistic about their own immorality, forever haranguing their friends and wives and children into self-serving arrangements that they then picked at with the childish, masochistic pleasure of little boys picking at their scabs. Her brother and Sarah had never had a traditional marriage—at least not a wholly monogamous one. (Even thinking it, Veronica could hear Abbie correcting her, reminding her not to equate monogamy, a latecomer when you consider the breadth of history, with tradition. “An aberration!” she imagined him bellowing with the particular glee he reserved for when he won an argument that he was having only with himself. “Something new under the sun!”)

  They’d married in the early eighties. Reagan was the silly president. New York had retained a louche permissiveness that the rest of the country, in rediscovering some celluloid, high-desert vision of itself, was supposedly leaving behind. Even in Manhattan, though, you could sense a change in the tolerated transgressions. Everyone wore suits all of a sudden, even the women, who looked terrible in them—the men only looked ridiculous—and did coke and aspired to steal money from retirees. Men had fewer love affairs, but there were more hookers. Veronica was sure that all these ethnographic impressions were completely wrong; if she’d ever mentioned them to her brother he’d have marshaled a statistical counterargument—delivered in that voice of utmost patience that signaled his utter disdain—to tell her very certainly that she was most assuredly wrong about all this. “The plural of anecdote,” he’d say with a smile. Abbie loved clichés the way some men love Beatles albums; they recalled the exaggeratedly pleasant memories that are so frequently scattered around recollections of an unpleasant youth. You couldn’t argue with him; what would be the point?

  The trouble with their marriage wasn’t that Abbie fucked other women, but that he fell in love with them. He could never accept this, and he privately accused Sarah of a more general female jealousy. “Female jealousy,” Veronica would repeat, and he’d sigh and say, “You know what I mean.” The problem was that he didn’t even realize that he fell in love with them; like all egotists, he failed to recognize his own reflection, thinking himself somehow larger than the strangely diminished man in the glass. And Veronica knew, to be fair, that he never loved any of them as much as he loved his wife, or at least, he never loved her any less than he loved any of them. Sarah, for her part, rarely slept with other men—when she did it, she did it instrumentally, usually because Abbie’s attention had wandered, and after all, as Abbie would have said, “We’ve all got needs.” He always tried to hide these other women, despite the fact that they’d agreed to their inevitable presence early on. In his mind, this had to do with her “jealousy issues,” whereas it was really the guilt that sprung from his unacknowledged infatuation with them. Veronica always knew when he was seeing someone because he became at once furtive and solicitous. He never knew when Sarah slept with other men. Likely he imagined she didn’t.

  “Hello, Abbie.” When she’d reached across her desk to answer the phone, she’d knocked a sheaf of relief maps onto the floor, and when she heard her brother’s voice and greeted him a second time, she leaned on the desk and looked at them forlornly, feeling that stooping to pick them up would represent a kind of defeat. “Fuck,” she muttered. It was nearly four, and Phil Harrow, her business partner in the venture whose plans now lay scattered on the carpet, would arrive any moment for the last meeting of the day. She had nothing but bad news for him.

  “Fuck you, too,” Abbie said. His voice sounded suspiciously jocular. Anytime he was anything other than lugubrious and condescending, she knew he was going to ask a favor. She hoped it would only be money. He’d hinted about it recently, though he never had the balls to come out and ask directly. Probably he was so twisted around about having a sister who made so much more than him that he’d never get over the embarrassment of asking.

  “Not fuck you,” she said. “I dropped something.”

  “Ahhh,” said Abbie.

  No, fuck you, thought Veronica. If he was going to be intolerable—when was he not, though?—then she was going to hang up. But he hadn’t really said anything, and she was acting like her mother. Or she told herself that she was acting like her mother, which always calmed her whenever she felt herself drifting into sentiment or annoyance, whether or not this was anything like her mother at all.

  “How are you?” she asked him.

  “In debt.”

  “Ah.” She hadn’t expected him to come out with it so easily.

  “It’s not your problem, of course.”

  “No,” she said, but how could she not have been thinking: then why did you bring it up to me?

  “It’s a curious thing,” Abbie told her. “I’m sought, but not compensated.”

  “I’m sure you’re compensated.”

  “Undercompensated.”

  “Mm,” she said. Her brother was famous in the minor way that people can become famous within their own professions without ever being known to anyone outside, and he lived grandly, flying from conference to museum to university to give talks about saving the world from impending catastrophe through new paradigms of design. In arguments, he’d even accused her—“you and your housing divisions,” he’d spat—of conspiring to drown the world. She knew that his firm was more concept than practice, and although the colleges paid for his flights and hotels and surely compensated him well for his worn-out and frankly hectoring prophesies, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually built something. She suspected that his and Sarah’s tastes in wines and restaurants and the frequent redecoration and renovation of their overlarge apartment were a little more than he could reasonably afford. Having reached a point in her own financial life where there was effectively nothing that she couldn’t reasonably afford, Veronica
took a slightly pornographic pleasure in speculating on the budgets of the more cruelly leveraged middle class, especially those to whom she was related.

  “Also,” he said, “I have a problem with a woman.”

  “Does Sarah know?”

  “About the money? Or the woman?”

  “Either, I suppose.”

  “No. The latter, certainly not.”

  “You should try monogamy, Abbie. It’s easier to keep your story straight.”

  “Lesbians,” he said.

  “Well,” Veronica replied. “Be that as it may.”

  “What am I going to do, though?”

  “About the woman or the money?”

  “Both.”

  Veronica sighed audibly. “Forget the former, concentrate on the latter.”

  “I might need a loan.”

  “A loan, Abbie. That entails repayment. With interest, as a general rule.”

  “Usurer.”

  “That’s Christian, Abbie. I think. And I have no such compunctions. The last time you asked me for money, we didn’t speak for a year.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Let’s not get into it.”

  “I didn’t pay you back.”

  “No. It was for the apartment. You told me you needed a larger one for a family.”

  “Yes, that didn’t work out. Not yet.”

  Veronica’s assistant tapped lightly on the office door and poked in her head. “Mr. Harrow is here. Should I send him back?”

  “You’d better tell him to wait,” she said.

  “Wait for what?” said Abbie.

  “Not you,” Veronica told him. “I was talking to my secretary.” Her secretary frowned as she closed the door. “Damn,” Veronica muttered. Jill hated being called a secretary, and who could blame her? She had some sort of absurd degree in studio art from some preposterously expensive private college that no one had ever heard of, and Veronica had hired her as an assistant in a rare moment of solidarity—with what, or whom, she wasn’t sure. She reminded herself to try to remember to offer the girl some kind of praise for professional acumen when just enough time had passed that it would not seem like a premeditated apology, knowing that she’d forget. Veronica was a feminist, obviously, but she occasionally—all right, more than occasionally—longed for a thick-ankled and omnicompetent older woman with a bad perm and worse attitude to keep her working life in order. Alas, they were like real craftsmen in the construction trades: dead, retired, ever harder to find, frightfully expensive when you did.