The Ruined House Read online

  In the end, Linda got over it. Her career as a social worker resumed its central place in her life and Rachel learned to respect her again, though more as a peer than a daughter. When, four years after her divorce, Linda met George, a charming psychotherapist, amateur gardener, and lover of literature and music, and married him a year later in a modest civil ceremony in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Rachel was thrilled for her and delighted to be her unofficial bridesmaid. Not even Andrew’s having been invited to the celebratory dinner party held in the private room of a nice Italian restaurant could cause her to lose her composure, at least not outwardly.

  9

  October 1, 2000

  The 2nd of Tishrei, 5761

  There was something special about those lazy Sunday mornings, which didn’t start until the afternoon. True, it felt a bit absurd to be bringing home bagels, cream cheese, and orange juice at an hour when the sun was already listing heavily westward, dappling the river with the first intimations of sunset. Nodding hello to the doorman, Andrew stepped outside and paused as usual by the two male figures flanking the entrance of the building, carved into the soft limestone. Its facade was studded with gargoyles, which once, in medieval Europe, may have symbolized something but were symbols only of themselves in America. Half-naked, muscular, and neoclassically handsome, they held up the building with an infinite, Atlas-like fatigue in their tormented faces. Andrew’s nod to the doorman was a salute to these figures as well.

  It was a warm, humid autumn day, a consequence no doubt of global warming. The street echoed with sound, which was strange, because Sundays were generally quiet. Something was in the air, something unusual that invoked in him an odd yearning, a pang of unclear desire. His heart swelled; his eyes misted and felt about to overflow. As though borne by an unperceived wind, jagged trumpet blasts could be heard in the distance, the bleat of rams’ horns tipped with pure silver. A walled city, round-bellied like a pregnant woman, stood by a river crossing. Its walls would fall on the seventh day, crumbling to dust. Where were those notes coming from? Was there a parade today? An open-air performance by a wind orchestra? A familiar song reached his ears, a song he knew well: Neil Diamond’s “Shilo.” Was it drifting through an open window on a lower floor? Young child with dreams, dream every dream on your own. It had been their theme song for an entire summer, the unforgettable summer of 1970. Smooth black fins, one after another, emerging from the sea’s metallic blue, overlapping each other in a dreamlike silence, forming a series of perfect arcs in the milky mist of the dawn. But could it really be their song? It no longer sounded like “Shilo.” And those trumpets! So many of them, a hundred or more, all blaring together.

  Papa says he’d love to be with you if he had the time. Young child with dreams, young child of joy: it wrenched his heart each time he heard his name. Wake up! What in the world was happening to him? Why all these bizarre thoughts? Gradually, the mysterious excitement was wearing off, leaving a vague sense of emptiness. He ran his fingers through his hair and scratched his head vigorously, the hard contact restoring him to his senses. What was going on? He had never felt so emotional for no reason. It was over now, though . . . almost. The distant sounds had faded, blending into the ordinary din of the city. Quiet at last. But why was the sun so burning hot when it was already October? Bagels. Right: bagels. The Absolute Bakery and then orange juice. He mustn’t forget the orange juice!

  Andrew turned left and started up 110th Street toward Broadway. A Jewish family passed by in the other direction, the father’s suit jacket open and his tie loosened. Behind him slowly strode a few young people with yarmulkes and prayer books, heading for Riverside Drive. Tashlikh, Andrew told himself, smiling fondly with sudden understanding. It was Rosh Hashanah (the word came to him in its old East European pronunciation, a relic of his distant Sunday school days) and tashlikh at the Hudson, with its colorfully symbolic casting of sins into the water, was an entertaining annual ritual that the Upper West Side was known for. Andrew had once gone to see it with a friend, a somewhat practicing Jew who lived in the neighborhood. He had enjoyed the colorful assortment of different clothes and lifestyles with its variety of skullcaps worn by men and women, interspersed with an occasional Orthodox black hat and even a shtreimel, a traditional Hasidic fur hat, that looked—against the background of the green trees and the white sails of the boats on the river—like an exotic, wild animal.

  Rosh Hashanah reminded him of Yom Kippur. That had to be soon, didn’t it? Andrew paused to write a reminder in the PalmPilot he drew from his jacket pocket: “Confirm Yom Kippur attendance. Check tickets and payment.” He read on, scrolling with a pencil point to check the coming two weeks. While all New York universities were closed on Yom Kippur, he wanted to make sure he had no other appointments. There it was. Monday, October 9: “10 a.m., Yom Kippur services.” That was seen to, then. Below it, though, appeared: Monday, October 9: “6 p.m. Friends of New York Opera Society. Maria Callas. Lecture and rare recordings.” Of course. Callas. He would have to leave the synagogue early. The lecture, with its never-before-heard tapes of the legendary soprano, promised to be fascinating. Open only to members of the society, it had probably sold out long ago, but Andrew had connections with more than a few cultural institutions in the city. He had written about their activities, had sat or was sitting on their boards, organized joint research projects—getting hold of two invitations would not be a problem. Ann Lee would be so happy! The thought of Ann Lee curled up on his brown leather couch in his spectacular silk robe, which clung to her thin, naked body, watching a TV program recorded the night before on some amazing high-tech innovation that her generation took for granted, sent a wave of warm desire through his body.

  10

  The way Andrew and Ann Lee met seemed stolen from a movie. In the second week of April 1999, the spring issue of the New Yorker had had an unusually stunning cover illustration of a good-looking young couple—an embodiment of the anorexic chic of the late nineties—kissing in the street while locked in an embrace that brimmed with youthful sexuality. The nipples of the girl’s breasts were taut against her thin T-shirt; her hair was gathered with fashionable little pins. The boy’s shirt was hiked up past his flat stomach, his sharply outlined pelvis showing above his low-slung pants. Their long, passionate kiss, which deserved a place in the hall of fame of iconic invocations of Eros, had a surprisingly powerful effect on Andrew, who first saw it on one of those Saturday mornings when he sat relaxing on the couch with his papers and magazines, his hair still rumpled from sleep and his cappuccino smelling of hot milk and cinnamon. There was something extraordinary about it, able to penetrate the defenses of a man exposed to large and frequent amounts of art—something enticing, rousing, even moving. Yes, moving. Andrew was moved. For the first time in years, something had touched him to a core that lay buried beneath many layers of knowledge and experience. His eyes glued to the cover, he studied its perfect depiction of the woman’s petite breasts, the round curve of her cheek, and the tilt of her swanlike neck. Even the body of the young man stirred him in an odd, unfamiliar way. It wasn’t strictly sexual; it had to do with something deeper, more elementary, of which sex was only a part. His entire person felt triggered into action: his muscles tensed, the small hairs of his body bristled, his skin tingled. Everything was suddenly alive. Andrew shut his eyes. Disjointed thoughts ran through his mind. He stretched, feeling the seductive kiss work its way into him and course through his veins. He pressed the sole of his bare foot against the couch, pleasurably probing its cool, rich leather. Something throbbed pleasantly between his thighs. Looking down, he smiled in wonder at the warm, boyish, almost full erection prodding his cloth pajama bottoms.

  That whole day and the day after that, Andrew continued to feel the same arousal. It carried over to Monday, too, with its promise of rejuvenation that, had he tried to find a word for it, he might have called in his playful manner “Renaissensual.” And then on Tuesday, which happened to be a warm, balmy spring day, at
exactly ten thirty a.m., he was surprised, almost startled, to see Ann Lee sitting by herself at a front table of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

  The women Andrew had gone out with since his divorce had been strikingly similar. All resembled feminine versions of himself. He had met them through the tightly woven network of professional New York intellectuals who commanded the city’s institutional intersections of knowledge and power: female professors, magazine editors, literary critics—well-groomed, attractive, elegant women in their early forties with imposing presences and sharp minds, most of them trim, tall, and athletic. The dynamic of his short-lived relationships with them was repetitive to the point that it might have been deemed an intrinsic part of courtship. A first, Saturday-night date. Dinners at upscale restaurants so alike that one couldn’t tell them apart: the same Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, or Pinot Grigio with the appetizers; the same Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Pinot Noir with the main course; the same cognac, grappa, or amaro to round off the meal. Such evenings almost always ended in the woman’s apartment, which, once he made out the unifying idea behind its multiplicity of detail, was like all the others. So was the enjoyable but never exciting sex that inevitably began—too soon and almost out of necessity—on the first date. It was followed, on the woman’s initiative, by a romantic weekend at a vacation home (a beachfront property or mountain lodge, depending on the season) belonging to her or a friend, or else jointly owned, in the Hamptons, Fire Island, the Berkshires, or the Poconos. Indeed, these occasions found Andrew surrounded by the woman’s friends, cooking for them, entertaining them, and impressing them with her choice of the ideal partner—soon after which their relationship invariably came to its painless, tearless, unprotested, and perfectly routine end. Had anyone invented a fictional version of Andrew’s love life, carefully constructing it to have as many complications and contradictions as possible, he could not possibly have imagined anyone so unlike these companions for a week or two, so much their polar opposite, as was Ann Lee.

  He had gotten to know her the previous autumn in his weekly research seminar. Her regular seat was opposite him at the end of an oval table, and although she was far from his most active student, Andrew felt that her presence and the partially verbalized communication between them were the class’s hidden axis, not only for him but also for all its participants.

  Nearly every teacher has a student who becomes the class’s center of gravity. Something in his or her look—a vital, almost telepathic spark—forges an unspoken bond that is a bit like falling in love, except that it is the love of pure knowledge. It is an ad hoc infatuation that should exist only for the duration of the lesson and under no circumstance be given other expression. There can be no greater mistake than the attempt to preserve it beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

  Yet sometimes, less frequently, it happens as well that a student, by virtue of physical beauty or sheer sexual magnetism, has a magical, hypnotic, almost obsessive effect on a teacher. The heady power of youth links up with that of professorial authority, reinforced by a strict, inviolable taboo, a powerful stimulant in its own right, hovering over the classroom like a threatening bird of prey.

  Ann Lee’s case was a good example. Each time that Andrew—who, like an actor, picked up every vibration from his audience and adjusted his performances accordingly—surveyed his students, his involuntary glance came to rest on her, forcing him to tear his eyes away before they both were equally embarrassed. She was gorgeous. Her face and proportions gave her beauty a rare, unmistakable quality that Andrew might best have described, had it not been so politically incorrect, as exotic. Young and unspoiled, she had lustrous skin and a willowy frame. Her head was a bit too large for her body, which sometimes lent her the look of a child. And she indeed looked a bit like a child, when Andrew saw her on that warm, balmy Tuesday as she sat, encircled by a softly glowing halo, at a front table of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

  11

  The Hungarian Pastry Shop, a pleasant, dimly lit café opposite the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue, was the perfect place to sit and write. It hadn’t been renovated in years, which only heightened its homey charm in the eyes of its regular customers. Its old-fashioned decor had a sweet-and-sour, European flavor. The walls, last replastered in the 1980s, were covered with dozens of naive, semi-primitive paintings of the kind once popularly referred to by the vague label of “modern art.” A single artist had painted them all, and all, without exception, had a single subject: angels—or, more precisely, the angelical. Well-built, flaxen-haired, and broad-shouldered, the rustic, Slavic-looking women bore hefty wings protruding from their muscular backs through flimsy garments. The café’s motley clientele of Columbia University students and professors, would-be actresses working as waitresses, and not-yet-though-no-doubt-soon-to-be-famous writers was interspersed with a handful of slovenly, unshaven eccentrics, relics of the neighborhood’s previous incarnation, who sat nursing a single cup of coffee all day while devouring cheap tabloids that, like them, seemed to have emerged from a time capsule.

  Andrew liked the Hungarian Pastry Shop. He came there to work, to meet colleagues, or just to read. Paradoxically, he found the continual hubbub of public places conducive to his inner quiet and creativity. Yet this quiet was disrupted that spring Tuesday upon seeing, to his surprise, Ann Lee sitting with a large notebook at a front table by the window, radiantly pretty. A cup of red herbal tea stood carefully aligned with the notebook, its vapors that rose to mingle with the sunbeams completing a perfect composition. It was their first encounter outside the seminar’s protective, neutralizing walls, which symbolized the endless prohibitions, justifications, and rationalizations that circumscribed his infatuation with her and ruled out the slightest possibility of doing anything about it. She was dressed with the same stylish nonchalance as she had been in his classes; her brightly colored, flared pants, which came almost to the ankles and were a throwback to the fashions of the seventies, made her even more attractive, invoking youthful memories as visceral as the strip of belly revealed by the midriff’s cunningly provocative cut and as innocent as her green kerchief and the two long braids descending from it. Resurrecting long-lost sensations: the foam on the waves, the sun’s warmth on bare skin, the salty-sweet kisses tasting of the ocean. Andrew was bewildered by the pounding of his heart and the quickened pulse at his temples, adolescent sensations that his body, seemingly long immunized against them, had allowed itself to forget. The previous Saturday’s spring fever, triggered by the kiss on the cover of the New Yorker, overcame him again with full force, augmented by a new urgency, a sense of alarm verging on panic. Adrenaline flooded his body. His footsteps slowed as he passed her table. Yet not daring to stop, he swallowed hard and made his way inside, pretending not to have seen her, though he had no idea whom he was trying to fool. Was it sensible to ignore her? Should he have said hello? Sat down next to her? He felt an itchy, nervous annoyance with himself that he hadn’t experienced in years.

  Andrew continued unsteadily to the back, managed to find an empty table, and sank heavily into a chair, careful to position himself behind a large column. Although suffused by a sour, physical sensation of missed opportunity, he couldn’t muster the courage to return to her table and make up for his lapse, couldn’t even conceive of it. He simply went on sitting there, huddled in his hiding place until he saw her get up and leave. A worn, brown suede jacket, a leather handbag slung across her back. Not until she was gone did he dare rise and go to the counter to order his coffee. At last, his rational defenses swung into action just as his brain finished processing the visual data transmitted to it in the split second he had paused by her table. The notebook was a musical score. She had been reading music.

  12

  Andrew was sure he was dreaming when he heard her voice over the telephone that same evening. He recognized it at once, despite her failure to identify herself. With a casual, even amused assurance, like someone talking to a confidant, she invited hi
m to a concert to be given by her choir. “It’s tomorrow night at seven, at Saint John the Divine. Can you make it?” Andrew was at a loss for words. His mouth dry, he groped for something to say before finally blurting the requisite “Yes, of course” in the choked, raspy voice of a frightened teenager.

  He groomed himself for the concert as he hadn’t done in years. For nearly an hour he stood before the mirror, putting on and taking off shirts, staining their stiff collars with perspiration mingled with blood from an overly close shave. In the end, he decided on black with a black jacket and gray tie, a worldly look that suited his crisp shock of hair. Confused by his excitement, he tried standing apart from it and putting it in perspective with a wry, paternal smile, only to be forced to acknowledge (his sweaty palms were the final giveaway) that he couldn’t remember when, if ever, he had last been so nervous before meeting a woman—none of which prepared him for the thrill of her intoxicatingly clear, siren-like voice that was threaded with the finest gossamers of silver. Like a precious metal, it had a perfection born of itself and comprehensible only on its own terms. Andrew stared at her with mounting emotion, his eyes on her mouth. He was in a state of lucid euphoria, last experienced by him in a younger, less jaded, more pristine time of his life. Nor did he expect the spontaneous, behind-stage hug he was given when the performance was over, or the salty, touchingly large tears that trickled from her tightly shut eyes.