The Forgotten Hours(27)
She didn’t want to make small talk with her father. He shouldn’t have asked her to go back to the cabin. But was that really it? She plucked the tarragon leaf from the rim of her glass and thought about the letters from Jack and all that paperwork, and she tried to remember if her father had ever clearly told her what had happened that night. Had he given her any sort of logical explanation? He must have, but she couldn’t remember. His voice had become mixed up with everyone else’s over the years—the lawyers, the judge, her mother and grandfather. Her brother. Everyone with an opinion, everyone taking sides. Now she felt a sudden, sharp confusion that stalled her.
Zev secured her a fresh drink; it was ice cold and should have tasted good, but there was a hint of something musty or maybe slightly off in it. He had started talking about his huge family, cousins and aunts and a million uncles on his mother’s side. There was one uncle in particular, his mother’s oldest brother, whom Zev had loved as a little boy. He was called Menashe: a huge man with a head of black hair that he could shift forward and backward on his scalp like a wig, using some magic alchemy that made kids go crazy with joy. Zev smiled, but his eyes were sad. “We adored him. Then one day I just never saw him again.”
Feeling suddenly dizzy and sick, Katie clamped her jaws together and took a small breath through her nose. “What happened?”
Zev twisted his mouth into a grimace. “Ah, there was a huge political scandal. He was the minister of housing in the seventies. Turns out he was embezzling money from the Labor Party and using it for gambling. But all I remember is that hair. How we all laughed so much we would choke on our own spit.”
She took another sip of her drink, but something was very wrong with her. She jumped up, wild eyed. “Be right back,” she said. “Sorry.”
Shouldering her way through the early evening crowd, she made it to the bathroom and managed to yank her scarf away from her face and lift up the yellowing toilet seat before throwing up.
Zev rode with her on the subway back to her apartment and walked her to her door. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked. “Do you want me to stay?”
“No, I’m okay. I don’t think so,” she said. “Thanks, though.” He released her elbow and kissed her on the cheek. Katie’s stomach turned again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I was sick—I should have just stayed at home.”
“Call me, okay? Let me know how you are.” He began to walk away but then turned back to her. “We should talk, Katie, okay? Find some time to talk about, well, my studio and so on. Maybe after I’m back from Spain.”
“Yes, right, I forgot about your trip,” she said, forcing a smile. He was heading to Barcelona for a week to attend some symposium. “Of course.”
Once upstairs, Katie pulled back her hair from her face and brushed her teeth. After almost twenty years of being part of the art scene in and around New York, Zev had a huge network of friends and connections to stay with when he came to the city. Months earlier, when they first started sleeping together, he would often leave very late at night, and she didn’t ask him where he was going. He wove in and out of her life without creating a sense of obligation in her; she’d loved that about him from the very beginning.
Now things were changing. First he’d turned up at her apartment that night without any notice. She knew it was supposed to be a nice surprise—and it was; they’d both been swept up in it—but it also meant he’d crossed a kind of boundary. Now he wanted to move in. The fact that she hadn’t told her father they were a couple (let alone told Zev anything about her father) must be proof of some sort of resistance or fear. She couldn’t quite shake the idea that Zev was the wrong man for her in the long run. That their easy intimacy was not enough to build a life on.
After sitting at her small kitchen table for a while, her hands wrapped around a mug of mint tea, she booted up her computer. When she had come to the city and begun working full time, she would come home at night to her first apartment (a tiny studio sublet), wired from the excitement of her day, and she’d lie on her bed and think of Jack. He was in the city somewhere, she’d felt certain of it, and she had liked the idea that she wasn’t really alone, that there was someone not that far away who knew her the way she had been during the first half of her life, the part that had unspooled without a snag. Over the years in college she had kept a distance from her family, but she had new friends; she had her studies. In her first six months in the city, her school friends hadn’t graduated yet, and she had seen almost no one outside work. It had been comforting to imagine Jack, his hair still thick and very blond, his long, lean body filled out. She’d wonder idly if he still played tennis, where he’d gone to college.
But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.
Really, she wanted to type Lulu Henderson into Google, but she could not bring herself to do it. To warm up, she started with Herb Schwartz, her father’s lawyer. Up came a series of entries, a few from lawyerly sites, but she was not actually interested in what had happened to Herb. Yesterday, she’d left David’s old pirate box in the kitchen at the cabin, knowing she would have to go back there soon, but she kept thinking about Jack’s letters to her—the fact that he had tried to contact her. It changed the way she thought about him. She’d never understood why he hadn’t found some way to reach out after the trial. It hurt to think he hadn’t bothered to show her any sympathy. To know, now, that Jack had cared about her—had, in fact, tried to contact her—softened her memories of him. She remembered how he’d observed her while they had all horsed around at the lake, too shy to butt in. That he’d watched out for her when they had all drunk too much. It was all coming back.