Well, that was my plan, she says. I wanted to kill you.
I know, he says. But wait until you see the house. Honestly, it’s a thing of beauty.
Was it worth it? she says, sour again.
Not a single day of our separation, he says. Not a moment. But if you come back to me, I can have both. The answer, then, would be a solid maybe.
She looks at Abe, her face drawn with exhaustion. Bit is wrenched for a moment out of his own sorrow. He sees now what he should have been attentive to all this time: the terrible hollowness of Hannah’s days. How her body at night would reach for the warmth of Abe beside her, as it had lain there for forty years, only to find a cold sheet; the dry, dusty feel of her anger, how stuffed she was with it, how bitter it tasted on the back of her tongue.
She scowls. Abe smiles and touches her nose with the tip of his finger.
Oh, all right, she says at last. I thought I’d make you beg more, but who cares. We’re not getting any younger. She looks at Bit significantly and says, You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.
She turns back to Abe and says, Give me a few more weeks until the semester is over and I’ll drive back home to you. You irresponsible, irritating, lying old man.
Abe smiles and leans to kiss her, but she’s not ready for that and pulls away. God. You always get what you want, she says.
Although his voice is apologetic, Abe says quietly, I do.
They eat at four, when the city is so quiet it could be a village. It is dark enough that the thousands of windows Bit can see from his apartment have begun to glow.
This is nice, says Abe, looking out the window at the flicks of falling snow. I always thought it was odd, you living in the city when you were born and raised on a commune in the middle of nowhere. Having to deal with all the pollution and stink and poverty and rats and junk. But days like this, I get it. It’s almost sweet, today. Or, at least, palatable.
Bit tried to live in the country, Hannah reminds Abe. For a little while.
It startles Bit to hear Hannah imply that it hadn’t worked out. Grete, who is chasing a Brussels sprout across her plate with her fork, was the result of that year. How could it have gone better? He thinks of Helle holding Grete for the first time. He had longed for the old way of childbirth, naked behind Helle, helping her rushes, smoothing back her hair, but she had been adamant: No way in hell we’re doing that dirty hippie shit, she’d said, and had scheduled the cesarean. Bit stayed planted at Helle’s head during the surgery in a fug of grief. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. The nurse hustled Grete away and brought her back clean, her face red and round with skin as ravaged as her mother’s, Helle’s as raw as the baby’s, a perfect match, a dovetail of need. At home, Helle’s hunger for her baby surprised Bit. He thought he would be the caretaker, the one who would get up, who would change, who would sing. It was Helle, though, who took over, and he knew the love she had for Grete for what it was: a seamless accord between souls. He tried not to be jealous that neither of the souls was his.
The loss cudgels into him again. His fork full of mashed potatoes is heavy in his hand. He’ll never understand how anyone would walk away from the tiny perfect place between Helle and Grete. He doesn’t believe anyone could.
His parents speak to each other; Hannah dabs cranberry sauce from Grete’s cheek. Bit can only look into the soft sift in the windows where he sees what his parents can’t; not knowing the whole, they can’t understand the lack. He, Bit, had let a coffee go cold in his hands, as he listened to the radio announcer describe how the two planes had flung themselves into the buildings there. Nearly two decades earlier, when he and his parents came into the city, he had named the buildings after Hannah and Astrid, playing with the way everyone in Arcadia had called the women the Twin Towers for their height and blondness; no matter that the buildings themselves grated on his sense of beauty, too awkward in their ambition. He’d grown accustomed to their silhouettes on the skyline. He gave them characteristics shared with their namesakes: Astrid colder, Hannah’s antenna the crown he’d always imagined for his mother. Almost twenty years after he first saw them, the one called Astrid collapsed in a skirt of dust. After that, the one called Hannah. He turned off the radio and felt the sadness well blackly up, and there was no way to tamp it down. It was absurd; thousands had died; his personal loss was a hole in the sky. But he couldn’t help it. He knew enough to get out, on foot, to go to Jincy’s neatnik house in the suburbs, to let her care for him.
The city, he’d thought at first, would do all right: there was hurt but a terrible rage to temper it. He was wrong. Even now, years later, it hasn’t quite rebounded. It winces and holds itself more closely. Even before the global downturn it seemed to Bit as if people were making do with their second-best coats, withholding their fullest joy. On the days that he swings through the city on his walks and watches his fellow creatures move with tight, clipped steps, he can almost grasp what they lost. It wasn’t what they believed; it wasn’t real estate or lives. It was the story they had told about themselves from the moment the Dutch had decanted from their ships onto the oyster-strewn island and traded land for guilders: that this place filled with water and wildlife was special, rare, equitable. That it could embrace everyone who came here, that there would be room and a chance to thrive, glamour and beauty. That this equality of purpose would keep them safe.
It isn’t important if the story was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.
Bit surprises himself by interrupting what Abe has been saying, something about curmudgeonly old Titus winning a thousand bucks from a lottery ticket. His voice is loud and fast with an urgency that startles Grete out of her dreamy play.
Abe, he says, it wasn’t the country that was so beautiful about the whole Arcadian experiment, don’t you see? It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air. This, here, now, is more utopia than utopia, more than your pretty little house out in the middle of the forest with only woodchucks for neighbors. Can’t you see? All of we kids are here, almost all of the kids from Arcadia, are here in the city. We’ve gone urban because we’re all looking for what we lost. This is the only place that approximates it. The closeness. The connection. Do you understand? It doesn’t exist anymore anywhere else.
He feels himself close to tears. The others stare at him. Grete puts down her fork and slides off her chair and climbs into Bit’s lap and pats his cheeks with her starfish hand. His parents send looks across the table to one another, as if to say, He’s finally going off the rails.
I’m not going off the rails, he says.
We never said you were, they say at once, and smile at each other. Jinx, says Hannah. You owe me a sodapop, says Abe, and they laugh in relief that they have deflected Bit, at least for now, at least a little.
Classes are like shoals of fish, Bit thinks at this week’s photography critique: something hungry gets into them and they surpass their natural speed. Sylvie’s group has begun to astound him. Their subjects are adult, deeply thought, riskier than undergraduates usually work (one boy takes photos of his little cousins in the bathtub, flirting with the line between art and child pornography; one girl takes a series of hands disappearing into the folds of fabric, silks and burlaps and muslins and cotton wool, gorgeously sensuous). There is a strange heat in the room whenever he enters it. And Sylvie of the shredded teeshirts, the knee-high boots, Sylvie whose face is so naked and pleading, smiles and praises when praise is due, and when it isn’t, she looks at Bit and holds her tongue and seems to be saying, Go on, please. I’m waiting.