Chapter 32
32
You remember—and this part’s important, you say, because for so long, we weren’t sure what would happen—Max getting into Brown. Yale. Swarthmore. It wasn’t about the schools. It was about possibility. You remember, of course, he went across the world to Oxford.
You remember feeling proud of him—you still are. He is smart and focused. I can’t take credit, you say. You don’t have to.
You remember visiting Max in England, taking him out to tea, walking to the top of the dome, a bench in Kew Gardens where you read side by side. It is something you have always done, have always been able to. You remember his beard, long shoes, paying for things and putting the change in his pocket, his head going side to side at the Tate.
You remember it was easier when he was older—not because you were closer per se but because expectations were different. You didn’t have to hold him to your chest, rock him to sleep, wipe his chin. He didn’t have to let you.
You remember on Central Park West, the Afghani woman who sold the best bananas, yoga on Mondays, cider after the Thanksgiving parade, realizing that you’d owned a particular brown coat for thirty-some years.
And, in a way, you remember that after that time flies. Or it feels like that.
If a story is a question of release of information. Or relief of information. We lived. The days went.
You remember you were always my first reader and that the book you told me wasn’t your favorite did the best. You remember the manuscript I never finished was the one that you never stopped hoping I’d return to. You remember coming with me on book tours except when I went to Germany because the kids at PS 84 had their annual art show celebration and you wanted to be there more. By that time, you had worked with them for well over a decade. You loved how they needed you. You aren’t too proud to say it—or that it is about Max.
You remember the time you drew the two of us. White background. Flicky strokes of pen. We framed it in silver and put it over our bed. A famous art collector came for dinner one night and threatened to take it right off the wall and keep it for himself. He was holding a glass of red wine, and I thought—and I meant it—spill it everywhere except on that. The things you’d take in a fire and so on.
You remember the Modern Love I wrote about you getting sick and when Bernadette Peters read it out loud onstage at the Delacorte. You had your arm over my shoulders and held my hand in my lap. We walked home with Bernadette in the Park, in the dark. She said she’d been a fan of both of ours for many years. Not just as artists, but as a couple. And you said, It hasn’t always been easy. And she said, No. Of course it hasn’t.
You remember manicures (Elli’s Salon), a waffle robe, candied kumquats, and polenta cake. You remember taking my mother to her PT appointments toward the end and how you held hands, her fingers like bird bones.
You remember one time asking her about her and Max, and she apologized for maybe overstepping and you just wept. No, you said. No.
You remember wondering when intelligence becomes wisdom and so on. There is a categorical and also indeterminable shift.
You remember when Max taught us to buy spices online and when he didn’t come home for Thanksgiving (mostly).
You remember when my mother died and how you knew at the very moment. It felt as if something had fallen and smashed in another room you said. And then the phone rang. She was eighty-six and there were complications with pneumonia and how odd, you thought. There was never anything cold, not one single thing, within her. She lived well until the end. We hosted shiva and wished she could have helped us. She did everything with grace. You dab at your eyes. Your mother, you say.
You remember how Max didn’t call you for weeks, as if it were your fault. As if he would have rather you went first. Not as if, you say. Because.
Stop.
You remember painting a mural for my mother at Sarah Lawrence. It was about women, specifically about mothers. The cashmere shawl was the background, of course. You asked David for his input. Oh, he said. It is impossible to be a mother in a lot of ways. I can only imagine. Blame feels beside the point. Even he had his gripes. Doesn’t everyone?
You remember that Max went and saw it but he never told you that. I did. I wanted you to know.
You remember sharing a bag of cherries as we walked down Riverside Drive. You remember holding your palm out for my pits. You remember how you never wished we hadn’t had Max, only that it had been easier. We could say that to each other. No one else.
You remember crocheting hats with flowers, meeting Bea and Collette and Leo Sinsky’s partner (you became close after he passed) for independent films, marching in Washington with Faye Miller (she was married to one of my camp friends) and her three girls, and voting. And praying. And praying more around voting time.
You exhale loudly. At first, I lurch toward you. It is habit. Then I remember the meaning of breath. You are still alive. I exhale too. How many times have we sat here like this? How many exhales together? Apart? How many more?
You are propped up against the headboard. There is white everywhere—or it feels like that. Curtains open. Clean sheets. Bernie changed them this morning with you on top. She must have seven arms, I think. Wild strength. There is a throng of yellow dahlias on the windowsill, your favorite. Who brought them? I wonder. It wasn’t me. It’s winter.
Want me to read you something? I say. I touch your head. Warm. Too warm? Too cold? You nod.
I go in the other room only for a second. The adrenaline spikes when I don’t have my eyes on you.
Mary Oliver. Today, I read you the one about the branches, the one about black oaks, the one about mysteries—and dancing. For a moment, I’m comforted. We live in cycles, not perpetuity. It takes a moment. Then all these hypotheticals, metaphors, fall flat.
Let’s keep going, you say.
Okay. I sit up taller as if the memories are water. Don’t drink lying down.
You remember years of trying to make your mother’s hummus and finally discovering the trick: brine. You remember the doorman on Seventy-Second and Central Park West who had the best whistle you’d ever heard, and when he died of a heart attack and how you wished you’d recorded him. You remember so much of that. The stories that live only in us, within us, and how they die every day with us too.
You remember telemarketers calling and asking for Lulu. How could they know?
You remember that I dedicated every one of my books to you except the one I dedicated to the three of us.
You remember the sound of the keys in the door, the window unlocking, me printing out a draft.
You remember Max’s first job at a gallery and how he talked to you about modernism at a café downtown. You remember his second and third jobs too. They called him the renegade, the prodigy. You remember Bea, Collette, reading about him in the paper for one sale or another. You can’t remember which. There were so many, after a time. You remember him telling you how much he made in a year like he knew he was getting away with murder. He was.
You remember him never asking about your art really except about the money. You remember talking about it in therapy. You always came back to: you were just happy he was all right.
You remember the Halls of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History, the chiropractor named Stephen on Eighty-Sixth whom you could have imagined as our son, yogurt sauce, Jing Fong’s third floor, lights on Central Park West in the winter, when we went to the Biennial and bumped into Max. Hello, parents, he said.
You remember one day, meeting him in the Park. You were walking home from therapy and he had just been visiting with a client. You spent the whole afternoon at the Met. He knew everything. You listened and listened. You could have listened to him for years.
He knows that, I say.
You remember that you never felt entitled to be proud of him but that you were wildly impressed by him, his work ethic, his independence. He is a force in this world, isn’t he? you say. Sometimes, you long to ask your mother if that was enough. As if only she could know. As if your mothering was entirely contingent on her mirroring it back to you. Yes or no.
You remember quitting coffee and when you realized it had been twenty-some years since your last cigarette and begging Max to quit. A do-as-I-say-not-as-I-used-to-do thing.
You remember holes in socks, packages with too much packaging tape, Vivaldi, a brand-new red wallet you dropped down the grates, losing your taste for cilantro, dinners with friends at their summer homes. You remember new moles, making a tiny tea set out of red clay, a button that wouldn’t stay clasped, pain aux raisins.
You remember years and years of Paps, the yellow ceiling in the office, an awful picture of an orchid, framed in black, metal stirrups, paper gowns, and never not holding your breath. The word remission comes from the Latin to send back. Nothing more.
You remember therapy, a rosemary plant, carrying an umbrella in the sun. You remember counting your lucky stars. You remember—and it wasn’t so long ago now—your Cooper Union mentees asking you about motherhood and art and you, shaking your head. It is the one thing I’m least sure of, you said. I’m not sure I can speak on it except to say, Ask for help from the people who love you.
You remember when our bathtub cracked and how sometimes, you still thought you could hear Max crying and it sent you reeling. Nearly thirty years later.
You remember holding my hand on Columbus and Seventy-Fifth, walking north on the east side of the street.
You remember one time, we went to Petrossian to celebrate. What? you ask. You don’t remember. Me either.
You remember Donny Hathaway and dancing in socks. I was never a good dancer, but you were. You remember knocking over a vase of white tulips, cranberry seltzer, a purple scarf, and the Asian tourists who stood in line for a photo outside the Dakota.
You remember when we decided to redo the top two floors, the jackhammer inside instead of outside. You remember the day they took out the windows that faced the street and you asked them to wait a moment. It felt like taking an outdoor shower or swimming naked. The vulnerability. So much New York.
You remember your book club, the joy of laughing with them. But also when Tammy’s son killed himself. They were so close, you say, different from you and Max; there is irony in there somewhere or maybe tragedy in real life. She came the next week. You all were reading Heartburn . You held hands as Bea read a section. Everyone’s eyes were closed.
You remember Italian lessons with the son of an opera singer at their apartment on Fifth, going to Art Basel, wearing Irene Neuwirth’s latest in exchange for one of your pieces. You remember blinding lights and being on a panel and signing autographs—it was so humid—and where was Max?
But okay.
Max came to most of my readings. But he never lingered.
Your words have loosened, pooled. Let’s take a break, I say. You nod without moving. I go downstairs. Be right back! I come back, more tea, but you are asleep. Your chest rises and lowers still. I’ll get myself a cup, I think. Or maybe I just want to wake you. But I look back. It is possible to be both here and everywhere. You, whispering to Max as he slept. You, getting into the bath. You, cracking an egg. You, smelling a red tulip with only half its petals in the Park. You, body stiff, your laughter like tap dancing against the gray as you wade into cold November water.
Don’t go is what I want to say.
Remember when you were stronger, braver than me? Remember all that fighting you did? I never could have fought like that. You built an actual loft inside your studio. You tied my ties even when Max had us broken and I was so very wrong. You wore purple lipstick and a silver gown when you were honored. But the honor is everyone else’s, you know. I know.
Don’t go.
Remember all those nights we’d lie in bed? Are you awake? Are you awake? We’d turn on the lights in the kitchen and make toast with blackberry jam.
You remember when the Style section photographed our brownstone and the chrysoprase you wore around your neck. You remember the stylist who said she wanted to be you when she grew up. You remember making her tea and wishing she would throw her phone into the trash.
You remember when I was nominated for the award I’d always wanted. When I lost, we walked around the Village and stopped at a street corner where we’d fought so many years before. You remember when I won it two years later. We were in Norway for the first time.
You remember the meeting when our financial adviser told us we’d be more than fine. Even if you didn’t ever sell another painting, I didn’t sell another book.
You remember that was the year we got the house in Orient. You remember that the city never bored us but: something.
Suddenly, you sigh. You stop. Is it just me or is your voice changing by the moment? It feels wispier, drier, like something flaking off in pieces. An old letter. I make cups with my hands as if I might catch it, the words.
Soon, you fall asleep or something like it. I’m here, I tell you because they say to always offer. I’m right here.
It is dark outside. I can see only the outline of your face, or maybe it is from memory. I am next to you, feet under your bed, unsure if my eyes are open or closed, if I’ve remembered to breathe, to move, to eat. I ride on your words like a wake.
Jane? I whisper.