The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates Page 5

  “It feels like a hunting lodge or an exquisite jewelry box. I despise it, but I’m in no position to let sincerity get in the way of a good apology.”

  “Pittsburgh,” Veronica said. “Some apology.”

  “You seem to have prospered,” Abbie told her. They were on Beechwood Boulevard gliding past handsome twenties-era houses with steep front yards and old trees.

  “Yes, true, but I arrived here by chance and it just happened to work out for me.”

  “Oh, mein shvester, you don’t give yourself enough credit for your personal vision.”

  “My vision? You sound like Phil after he’s picked up a Drucker book in an airport. Please. It’s the people who pursue fixed visions who end up bankrupt.”

  “Phil reads management texts? Do I really have to meet this person? And I’ve not found visions to be especially fixed.”

  “You do. And by the way that sounds very spiritual, Abbie.” They’d come down the hill on lower Beechwood past the old mansions on their vast, improbable yards, and she hung a left onto Fifth Avenue. On the corner, a huge storybook Tudor stood in a tangle of unkempt landscaping. “Now that,” Abbie said, “is a house. It’s like Queen Elizabeth met Mad King Ludwig.”

  “I’d die to get a crack at restoring it,” Veronica said. “The family won’t sell, but they’re old. No kids. So, one of these days.”

  “Regardless, and to get back to it, yes. I would say spiritual is the proper word.”

  “Should I be concerned? Remember when you got into yoga?”

  “Yes. Dad was not impressed. ‘How am I going to tell your mother that you’re into some Jap religion?’”

  Veronica laughed. “Oh, God, that’s right. I can still hear you. ‘It’s South Asian, Dad. If anyone has a reason to be upset with the Japanese.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Abbie said, “ ‘But whatever else they did to those people, the Japs didn’t do a sneak attack on them, like they did to us!’”

  “Stop. I can’t breathe, and I’m trying to drive.”

  “He forgave the Germans for the Holocaust, but those dirty Japs.”

  “Seriously, Abbie. I’m going to have to pull over.”

  “Seriously, though, I did have a sort of a vision. I keep telling you.”

  “A vision, was it?”

  “I can hear the worldly skepticism in your voice, but yes. A vision. I know what you’re thinking.”

  She was thinking that in his early professional years, Abbie had styled himself a sort of scientist, rigorous and rational, devoted to a very mathematical sort of beauty—somewhere along the way, he’d discovered that it was better for his interests to be grandiloquent, and he’d adopted a tone of secular mysticism, speaking of his world-saving projects in a quasi-religious and semi-revelatory language, which had landed him all those speaking gigs while frightening off his more traditional clients, who would have been perfectly happy to save on their water utilities or feel that their new thirty-story office tower was in some absurd way actually good for the environment, but who couldn’t abide some mad prophet of civilizational doom telling them that an extra hundred dollars a square foot would, over the passage of the decades, at very best, if everyone else did it too, marginally slow the inevitable rising of the tides. She blamed that nut job he’d studied with at Yale; not that Abbie had paid him much attention while he was there, but later, after the old man died, his publisher had approached Abbie about writing the introduction to one last posthumous book. The two men had kept in only intermittent touch over the years, and Abbie was shocked to find that Arah had stipulated the request to his editor before he died. The book was called The Pillar of Salt: The American City in the Age of Declining Resources, and it told a grim tale of the last air conditioners cycling off in the great, rolling brownout at the end of the easy-energy carbon civilization.

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “You’re thinking I’ve gone slightly around the bend. But I’m not about to start babbling on a street corner.”

  “Going to keep it to the lecture hall, huh?”

  “You’re feeling awfully wicked for a woman who needs my help with something.”

  “That’s fair enough. I’m sorry. Tell me about your vision.”

  They’d come, coincidentally, to a red light at the corner of Morewood. Across the street on their right, the green dome of Rodef Shalom rose over the tops of the sycamores. “I was shown a place,” Abbie said. “And I think I’ve dreamed of this place before, but as is the case with dreams, the particulars dissolved when I woke from the dream, leaving me only with the sense that I’d just failed to apprehend something very important. This time, though, I was not asleep. Oddly enough, actually”—he chuckled—“as I was in a synagogue at the time, which is a place I generally find more conducive to sleep than to epiphany.”

  “You were in a synagogue?”

  “Temple, I suppose. Yes. Sarah’s brother’s thing, you know. It was all very musical, which made it especially ridiculous. I’m not sure what happened to make every goddamn Reform rabbi decide that he’s Pete Seeger, but there it is. Sarah was torturing herself with her usual dutiful reticence, her mother was making a particularly ostentatious show of not quite crying, which is worse and more noticeable than crying—that’s plainly the point, of course—and her dad constantly clearing his throat. I was daydreaming about committing arson. And that was when God spoke to me. Of course, God doesn’t speak; God’s speech is a metaphor for His placing a vision in your eyes and in your heart, which is suffused with the certitude that this is what He would have told you if He did, in fact, literally speak. The place He showed me is somewhere in the Appalachians; I’m sure of that. I stood on a low foothill looking eastward. I know I was looking eastward because the sun was setting behind me. Before me, a highway wound up over the first ridge of a mountain. At the crest of the ridge, somewhere off to the south, I saw a small clearing, and I knew that I was meant to find and to possess some portion of that mountain, for some reason that is, as yet, unclear to me. Naturally, I thought of you.”

  They turned onto Neville. “Abbie,” Veronica said, “I think you’re full of shit, but under no circumstances are you allowed to tell your wife that you came out here because of some Old Testament daydream. You are on the apology tour. You are here to save your marriage.”

  “And save your subdivision.”

  She pulled to the curb across from the D’Arlington. “It’s a planned neighborhood. Dinner tonight is at eight. Are you sure you can find it?”

  “God is my copilot.”

  “Christ, Abbie. Good-bye.”

  He kissed her cheek and made a suicidal dash across the street in front of an oncoming truck. On the far curb, he blew her a kiss and pointed toward heaven like a quarterback after converting on a big third down.

  • • •

  “Have you ever met her?”

  “What’s that?” Abbie glanced at Sarah as they drove up the McArdle Roadway on the side of Mt. Washington. On the right, through the trees, the city appeared intermittently, lending the impression of riding up an escalator. They passed under the tracks of the Monongahela Incline.

  “Edith. Your sister’s friend.”

  “Her friend. That’s a charmingly provincial circumlocution. You’re adapting.”

  “Oh, shut up, Abbie. You know what I mean. It isn’t always a debate, you know.”

  “Yes, of course, I do.”

  “That it isn’t a debate, or what I mean.”

  “The latter. Both.”

  “It seems absurd to say girlfriend. They’re in their forties.”

  “Edith is in her late thirties, I believe, but you’re right, honey. Your point is taken. This is a lovely road, don’t you think? The views.”

  “It’s a lovely city. I hadn’t expected. I’m glad we came.”

  Abbie reached across the center console and took her hand. “I’m glad,” he said.

  She permitted him that much for a few moments before they came to the li
ght at the top of the hill, then removed it, although gently now, as she’d begun forcing herself to do. Sarah had yet to decide if love was in greater part forgiveness or forbearance. They weren’t the same thing, but you only learned that out of necessity, and the conditions that made it necessary were terrible. She sometimes told herself that she saw in him something that was worth redeeming. Because if not . . .

  Whatever else Sarah believed, she did not believe that Abbie was a genius. This made her an outlier among those who knew him, but maybe not so strange if you think about it. Before she got tired of talking to people, Sarah used to say that their exodus out of New York inverted the usual story of people getting rich, and in so doing rediscovered in some way an older or more original form of American good fortune. People used to go west to make their fortunes, striking out from the rigid castes of the Eastern Seaboard in order to find wealth and freedom on the frontier. Later, the frontier closed and it was to escape the stultifying social and economic circumstances of the agrarian heartland that people fled back to the big cities, where a person might reinvent herself as whatever and whomever she wanted to be. Then people were fleeing the biggest cities again, because no one who wasn’t already rich could live in them. They were looking for the good lives and relative material comforts that were still available out in the provinces that began somewhere around Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and rolled across the whole beautiful continent until they washed up against the equally unaffordable cities of California. She meant it all half-ironically, since she never once felt at home after they left Manhattan, and her son, with whom she made the mistake of sharing some version of these thoughts years after she’d first had them, was an intolerable undergrad at the time. He thought that they revealed her as a rather facile thinker when it came to sociology and economics and history—the whole notion of the blessed heartland could have been cribbed from any political speech of the past century at least; the ruins of Detroit or the Mexican laborers of the Central Valley or, God knew, a few First Peoples here and there, would have something contrary to say about the sentiment. If he’d been older, or less like his father in that way, then he might have asked if it was fair to blame anyone for the lies that sand down the rough edges of her circumstances.

  They met Veronica and her business partner, Phillip T. Harrow, at LeMont, a restaurant perched on the high edge of Mt. Washington, a sort of recherché supper club with vast windows that looked across the converging rivers and the fountain at the Point to the commodal concrete bowl of Three Rivers Stadium. Even the valets wore rough approximations of tuxedos, and the interior seemed designed to seat hundreds, but on a weeknight, it was populated sparsely, and a radio broadcast of the Pirates game that was lighting up the stadium far below whispered tinnily into the hushed room from somewhere behind the bar. Barry Bonds had singled.

  Harrow was almost precisely what Abbie had expected, a great, grand buffoon in a loud jacket, gone a bit soft in middle age but with the taut strength of a man who’d worked construction much of his life. A pair of spectacles dangled on a cord around his neck, and he looked—it was his usual state—a little flushed. He greeted Abbie with a rushing handshake, kissed Sarah on both cheeks, and then went back to Abbie for one more throttling shake of the hand and a jolting slap on the shoulder. “So this is the guy!” He said it twice.

  In fact, Harrow wasn’t quite so crude as he put on. Yes, he was from West Virginia, but he was the son of a WVU professor and a Morgantown Hospital finance VP, and he’d gone to Ohio State, where he’d got a degree in accounting and then an MBA. He wasn’t a country boy, really, even if he could do a tolerable imitation of the accent when called upon. His beery bearing had less to do with his native state than with the lingering influence of Greek life in the Ohio Union, that avuncular, overacted jocularity that always seems to be compensating for something. He’d always hated West Virginia, actually. And yet he’d made a great deal of money in it. That was something, he supposed. The truth was that there was a lot of money in the poor states; or it rolled around more loosely than it did in richer and more populous ones; it was easier to shake loose. But he kept a condo in Pittsburgh, and he’d surprise you by knowing a thing or two about wine and the theater, and although he’d never let on, he sometimes wept at the opera.

  Edith wasn’t feeling well—Edith, they’d learn, was often not feeling well—and she didn’t join them. Abbie had only the vaguest sense of his sister’s companion—and he was aware of the irony of thinking of her in that term while making fun of Sarah’s preference for the no-more-euphemistic friend. She worked, or had worked, for Harrow; he knew that much, and in some way this had led to his and Veronica’s partnership. There was, Abbie thought, some irony in the fact that everyone else in the restaurant would assume that Phil and Veronica were a couple. Abbie delighted in inequities of information; they struck him as the true genealogical or etymological origin of humor, the primordial language from which all jokes ultimately emerged.

  The menu represented, in that era, an extraordinary archaeology of otherwise lost dishes; this was in the eighties, of course, long before America devoted whole television networks to the fussy preparation of complex dishes, before waiters listed the components of dishes in a sort of catechismal fugue state, but still, it was as if someone had rescued the menu from the first-class dining room of a sunken ocean liner and transported it five hundred miles inland. Abbie ordered duck à l’orange, and when he specified to the waitress that he preferred it medium rare, she shook her head and said, “Oh, hon, you don’t want it like that. You’ll get that trichinosis.”

  Abbie began to object, but Veronica put her hand on his arm and shook her head.

  When they’d all ordered and the waitress was gone, Abbie raised his eyebrows at his sister. “Really?” he said.

  “They mean well,” she told him. She shrugged. “It’s a city of hypochondriacs, and everyone thinks they’ve got a goddamn MD. Phil can attest.”

  “Well,” Harrow said, “that and the old joke.”

  “What joke is that?” asked Sarah.

  Harrow tilted his head wolfishly in her direction and leaned into the table as if taking her into a confidence. “How do you get a Pittsburgh girl to suck your cock?”

  “Oh Christ, Phil,” Veronica said. “It’s dinner.”

  “Mrs. Mayer here looks like she can take it. Can you take it, Sarah?” His grin widened. Veronica looked worryingly at her brother, but he betrayed not the slightest indication of paying attention to the conversation anymore. He was half turned in his seat, examining the room.

  “Well, now you have to tell me,” Sarah said.

  “You dip it in ranch!” He rocked back and slapped the table. Veronica rolled her eyes, and Sarah smiled thinly. “You get it?” Harrow tried again. “Like, ranch dressing?” He narrowed his eyes. “You get it,” he said. “Well, anyway, it’s a Pittsburgh thing. And here’s the wine!” Harrow had ordered a bottle listed at two hundred dollars, and as the waiter—a different one this time, young and male and too thin for his collar—opened and poured his ceremonial taste, he gave it a grand swirl and sniffed and sipped. He nodded brusquely at the boy, then told the table: “A good California cab. Robust! Not like that French shit.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “I’ve read that American wine is really coming into its own.”

  “Where have you read that?” Abbie’s attention had returned.

  “I don’t know, Abbie. Bon Appétit.”

  He made a face.

  Harrow said, “It’s true, it’s true. Ever since the seventies, really. Well, a toast, then.” He raised his glass. “To new endeavors.”

  They touched glasses. Veronica watched her brother and sister-in-law carefully. She could still remember when they’d met, when Abbie was slathering his genius all over that poor unsuspecting temple, bullying the leadership into believing that they were courageous to let him use their sanctuary as an experiment, then furious when they managed, late in the process, to work up the courage to que
stion a few of his most objectionable choices. Architects, in her experience, were second only to economists in their preference for models of human behavior rather than humans themselves, an abiding conviction that people were automata who only responded to stimuli, or, if they were not so, then that they ought to be, that through proper design and incentives, they could be made to behave as if they were. And Abbie, likewise, harbored the streak of misanthropy that colored so many of the ecologically minded, an unspoken but obviously present sentiment, a ghost haunting the edges of his mixed-up ideology: that the world would be better off without us. In the strictest sense, of course, that might have been true; but it was one of those immense truths that faded into irrelevance when confronted with the banal details of reality. Abbie had harangued and intimidated the Beth-El board, and Sarah, who was still young enough to consider them all ancient and hidebound, fell in love with him. She’d hitched herself to some idea of his greatness, and even after she’d stopped fully believing in it herself, a kind of invincible bond remained.

  Just a few nights earlier, Veronica and Edith had been lying on the couch watching TV, some sitcom about a bickering couple, and Veronica had made a vague comment about the unreality of the setup, so common in TV and movies and the theater, of the eternally miserable couple forever at each other’s throats. Edith had laughed at her and told her that that was the way most people lived together; that love and hatred were the same sort of unmooring of sentiment from moderation, and it was no wonder that the one would so frequently cohabit with the other. “You’re so smart,” Veronica told her and kissed her head, then, thinking the gesture might have been condescending, she added, “I mean, really.” Edith had been an all-but-dissertation grad student at Pitt before her parents’ careless finances and untimely deaths in a car accident, which Edith mordantly called a double-suicide by inattention, had forced her to look for work. Like so many women, she found herself in real estate, and through it, with Phil Harrow, who was just expanding his business into Pennsylvania at the time.