“It’s a long way down,” she whispered.
“The longest.”
They both stood looking at the river beneath them. No walkers or strollers or joggers passed behind them, and Benny couldn’t hear sounds of traffic. The entire city had seemingly emptied out, and stillness possessed it, as it would a necropolis. He thought he heard his own watch ticking for two minutes before she said, “No. I can’t. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“You can’t?” he asked. “Why not?”
For answer, she turned to him, and with one hand at his waist, she raised her other hand to Benny’s face in a slow-motion caress, the most personal gesture she had ever made in his direction. “Because of you,” she said. It had killed her to say it, he knew, but she had said it, and now tears were in her eyes as well. Then she whispered, “I’m a kidder. I joke about things. That’s the one thing I’m serious about, my joking. That’s how I meet the payroll.” She was touching him here and there. “What do we do about the hopes? The loans? The, uh, ambitions? Tell me something. Are you in love with me?”
“Yes,” he said miserably and proudly. “I am. I’ve said so. I’ve told you. Often.”
“Okay. We’ll have to work this out, I guess. But you can’t stop me from what I am. I’m a joker, all right? Give me me.”
“That was a very impressive speech,” he said with pride and tenderness.
“I thought so,” she said, closing her eyes. “It was me at my best.”
“Could I say something else?” he asked. “Because I’ll say it anyway.”
“Permission to speak.”
“The baby won’t be laughable. Infant care ditto. Okay, so: here’s my thinking. One: I still love you. Two: what are we going to do about this baby, assuming you keep it? And three: I’ve forgotten what three is.”
“Oh, my sister called.”
“What?”
“My sister, the second one, the rich wife who lives in Dutchess County? — she called. On the phone. Carrie. She’s named Carrie. That’s her name. That’s how she was baptized. You remember Carrie? Of course you do. She’s one of my two evil sisters, both of whom live in palazzos. She said she’ll take the baby if we want her to.” Sarah paused. “She’d be happy to acquire him, her, it. She’s used to mergers and acquisitions. She and her husband, Lord Randolph, have these amazing pots of money. Their dragon wings are spread out wide over their vast illegal fortune wrested out of the hands of the poor and harmless. Randolph participates in a cartel of international slime. One more baby will hardly make a dent in their studied concentration on cash.”
“You called her? You told her? And she made an offer? No, she won’t do that.”
“You’re right, she won’t,” Sarah said. “And do you know why?”
“Because we’re going to get married?”
“Exactly! Bingo! We’re going to get married. What a nice proposal. Where’s my diamond ring?” Against the odds, she embraced him and held him, and then she turned so that her back was pressed against his chest, and his arms circled her waist.
“Your ring’s around here somewhere. And how will our marriage work out?” he asked.
“Wait and see,” she said. “I repeat: you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
—
Which is how Benny Takemitsu, a third-generation Japanese-American who spoke little or no Japanese, a citizen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a journeyman architect at the firm of Byrum and Haddam, a man who had such a weakness for women who could make him laugh that he could not help falling in love with such a woman, came to marry someone who had never kissed him but who had, at least, caressed his face. They conceived a child together and still she could not bear to kiss him, not before or after the child was born, a son whom they named Julian. Stranger things have happened, Benny would sometimes say to himself, about his wife’s particular form of chastity.
Sarah had laughed and groaned during the pains of labor to the consternation of the attending nurses, who had never witnessed such laughter before, or so much of it.
The baby’s pediatrician was Dr. Elijah Elliott Jones, who praised the boy’s health and equanimity and handsome features as if Julian were his own son.
—
Sometimes during the summer they sat together on a playground near the Mississippi River, the four of them: Benny, Sarah, Julian, and Benny’s mother, Dorothea, who usually watched the baby whenever Sarah fell into one of her periodic brown studies, which, following the birth, had increased in duration and intensity. Often they packed sandwiches for a picnic, Sarah’s favorite being curried chicken salad and deviled eggs. At such times, having finished nursing her son and having tied the loops of his sun hat, Sarah would stare off in the direction of the river’s other shore as if Sirens sang over there, and only nudges and direct address could call her back. “She’s just woolgather
ing,” Benny’s mother would say, quietly and affectionately, with a shrug, about her red-haired daughter-in-law. “In my generation,” Dorothea whispered to her son, “women often looked like that. We were distracted. All of us.”
Once in late summer, however, Sarah startled to life and waved her hand in front of her face to dispel the mosquitoes. She seemed to be coming up from some depth somewhere in another life. Turning one by one to Benny, Julian, and her mother-in-law, she smiled as if she approved of all of them and could bless them. Benny sat on a bench next to her, the baby sleeping in his lap, and Benny’s mother, who had strolled to the edge of the Mississippi, was examining the wildflowers along the bank. Grade-school children yelled from the play structure, and nearby a freight train rattled over the river, heading north. Overhead, an airplane left behind a thin vapor trail, and in the trees the cicadas chirred. “I never played any Bach for you,” she said, her voice a soft murmur. “And I don’t do stand-up anymore.”
“You still can.”
“I’ve never played any Bach for you,” she repeated. “I always meant to. Do you know that story about Bach? The last night of his life?” Benny shook his head. Holding Benny’s hand, Sarah continued with the story. “I read it on the back of a record album. You know Bach went blind? He had cataracts and things, probably. And to make matters worse, he was treated by this guy, this traveling English quack doctor named Taylor. Goodbye, eyesight. So anyway, on the evening before he died, Bach is granted a momentary miraculous return of his vision. His sons take him outside, one on each arm, and, guess what, Bach gazes upward to see the stars. The next day he died.” She looked straight up as if in imitation.
“I like that story.”
“Me too.” She held up her index finger to make a final pronouncement, one that Benny would always remember. “To his servant Bach, God granted a final glimpse of the heavens.”
Julian, now awake in his father’s lap, reached up to his mother’s face, whereupon she smiled.
—
She didn’t die the way Benny thought she would, after a long life. Instead, she lost control of her car in a rainstorm. Her car skidded off the freeway and rolled four times down a hill. She would have survived the accident if she had been wearing a seat belt, but for some reason she hadn’t bothered to attach it that particular day.
—
After she died, he grieved for her as he had grieved for her when she had still been alive — as a passion thriving on an absence that feeds on itself year after year. For months, out of habit, he continued to sketch possible houses in which she might have been happy, although none of these houses ever had human figures inside them.
—
Benny’s second wife, Jane, also an architect, is a tall brainy woman who loves Benny and Julian dearly, and together they have had two more children, twins. Myths and fairy tales instruct us that the arrival of the stepmother is to be feared, but she has always treated Julian as her own child, and although she has learned to discipline him when the situation requires it, her scolding lacks a certain force and confidence. One coincidence, if it could be called that, is that Jane’s red hair is so similar to the color that Sarah imported to herself that the two women might have once been mistaken for each other, and when she dresses Julian in his snowsuit — a