The Book of V.: A Novel(55)
Her brothers shake their heads.
“I brought the Times. And she saw me slide the book review under the stack. Which I always do. And she said, You have no right to do that. And I was like, What are you talking about? I thought she might be confused, like she didn’t know who I was suddenly, or what was happening. Then she said, You have no right to be jealous, Lily. You haven’t written anything.”
Ian whistles softly. “That’s harsh.”
“But correct!” Lily says.
“Oh come on, Lil.” Lionel’s voice tilts into the one she guesses he must use with frustrated clients. “Couldn’t you still maybe get some kind of—”
“Stop. I didn’t tell you that so we could talk about me. I told you because it was just so Mom.” This is true. Though it is also probably true that on some level Lily does want to talk about herself. She cannot pretend not to be aware that certain problems she has neglected await her once the immediate aftermath of Ruth’s death is attended to. The Purim dresses, for one. The morning after she and Ruth agreed that Ruth would teach her to sew, Lily picked up a rental machine from a shop on Avenue N and set it up according to Ruth’s instructions, but by the next day, Ruth was too tired to get out of bed. Now the machine is still sitting on her desk, unused, and the dresses are still not made. And then there is the problem of Adam. Or if not of Adam, then of Hal, who continues to invite Lily and the kids to the no-name pizza place each Thursday and hang out not quite in the background during her nightly trysts with Adam. Adam thinks it’s nice that she and Hal take the kids out together. And Adam benefits—in bed, on the kitchen island, on the bathmat. So maybe it’s not really a problem? Adam and Hal have their meetings—Hal has even started giving presentations to Adam’s bosses; his charisma, as Adam calls it, is apparently a real asset—and Lily and Adam have theirs. And won’t it all end now anyway, automatically? At this moment perched between her brothers in this bar, Lily can’t imagine her body ever wanting anything like that again, not with Adam or Hal or anyone. She can’t even imagine standing up.
You have no right to be jealous, said her mother.
But then what can she be?
This is the worst problem, of course, the one that hangs over everything else, like a silent, fiery planet on the verge of explosion, or maybe implosion—what Lily is going to do with herself. Beyond mothering. And being mothered. And screwing her husband and fantasizing about his friend/colleague. And trying to save Ruth. She’d been given someone to save after all. She’d been given a mission, albeit a twenty-first-century, American, self-involved mission. But unlike Esther, Lily failed. Now that Ruth is gone, what force will steer her? Beyond semiprofessionally screwing up laundry, which strikes her now as pitiful in the same way that hiding the New York Times Book Review from herself is pitiful: opposite ends of the same spectrum. To care or not to care. Even the spectrum is pitiful. As if all Lily boils down to—if one were to boil her, singe her shell off, pick out her meat—is a poster woman for a think piece on having or not having it all. But Lily’s conundrum goes beyond whether or not to work. She will work again, if not at the work she already knows how to do, if only because they will eventually need and be able to afford—once both girls are in school—a second income. Her question is, Who will she be?
Lily sips her scotch and winces. Why is she drinking scotch? She doesn’t like it. She is drinking it because it’s what her brothers drink. She slides her glass toward Ian and waves for the bartender. “Do you know what Mom liked to drink when we were kids?”
“Bourbon on the rocks,” Ian says.
Lily orders a bourbon. Six hours have passed, then seven. Out the bar’s window they watch the last slash of light disappear from the narrow street. Ian lays his cheek down on the bar, and Lionel says to Lily: “You did good.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Mom. This whole?…?all of it.”
“Okay.”
“Did you ever feel—did you ever want to just call the doctors and?…?”
“I did call the doctors. Often.”
“But I mean just to—”
“Wait a second. Was that a backhanded compliment?” Lily’s head is heavier than she realized. She is maybe drunk. “Are you accusing me of not seeing what was happening?”
“No!”
“What happened was entirely common in non–small cell lung cancer patients. The chemo weakens the immune system, and once infection sets in, sepsis—”
“Lily! That’s not it. I promise. I was just saying, I don’t know how?…?if I were in your place, I don’t know if I could have?…”
Ian slides his glass into Lionel’s, shutting him up, then lifts his face off the bar and slides his glass into Lily’s. Clink. Clink. “He’s saying thank you,” he says, and slides Lionel’s glass into Lily’s.
The clinks repeat themselves in her ears. Her brothers are quiet, watching her. For years she has thought of them as enlarged versions of their boy selves: Lionel the natural boss, interested in money, attentive to details; Ian the jock and peacemaker who tried his best to go along. She has sensed that they think in the same way about her: the smart but hapless baby, overly sensitive, thinks too much. But Lionel is anxious, even fearful, and Ian, if she bothers to think for even a minute about the basic facts of his life, has not been able to just go along.