The Ruined House Read online

  Who would win the coveted operation? Tune in next week. And now a break for commercials. Andrew turned disgustedly away from the flickering screen. It was unbelievable what junk the popular channels fed their audiences. He glanced at the clock hanging above the mirrors on the wall. Eleven fifteen—his session was over. There was just enough time for a few minutes in the sauna, a shower, and a shave. The post-rush-hour subway ride would not pass unpleasantly with time for a quick look at a new book sent to him for review, followed by a short, invigorating walk from the Christopher Street station to the Tisch Building. His class started at twelve thirty. The weather was gorgeous, more springlike than autumnal.

  3

  October 26, 2000

  The 27th of Tishrei, 5761

  Four p.m. Andrew exited the subway and headed down 110th Street, sifting through his mail as he walked and deciding which envelopes to keep and which to throw out before getting home. Amid the brown paper wrappings, a white manila envelope from Israel with English, Hebrew, and Arabic print caught his eye, and he stopped near his building to open it. It was the annual report of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (the awkwardly transliterated word gave him a prickly, uncomfortable sensation), accompanied by an invitation to a three-day conference of Israeli, Palestinian, American, and European scholars on human rights violations and restrictions on academic freedom in the West Bank and Gaza. Although there was nothing unusual about it—he received dozens of such notices every year—something, perhaps it was the sight of the square Hebrew letters printed on the envelope, caused his pulse to quicken as though it were an unexpected letter from the tax authorities or an old lover.

  A loud, merry noise made him turn its way. Looking up from the invitation, he saw an unshaven man in his thirties, his ultra-thin designer glasses a comical contrast with his rough-hewn face, leave the building across the street and head for the park with two dogs. One white and one brown, they chased each other as though playing tag, winding their leashes around him while he laughed encouragement in a foreign, half-familiar-sounding language. Greek? Arabic? Persian? Andrew racked his brain, studying the broad, swarthy face. The dogs went on romping while their owner continued to laugh, addressing them fondly. Now, Andrew identified the language. It was Hebrew. What an odd coincidence! He was from Israel, he’s an Israeli.

  Andrew had first visited Israel in 1969 with a student group organized by the Jewish Agency. The trip now seemed to him a dream or hallucination. The savage outpouring of light that reflected violently off Jerusalem’s stone walls had blinded him and coated his memory with a pinkish haze like the discoloration in an old photograph that gradually reduces it to a single, blurry hue. Whenever he thought of the Dome of the Rock, or of the blazing stone ruins by the Western Wall, he envisioned them as just a snapshot.

  Throughout their tour, young Andy and his fellow students had been unable to shake off a nagging, almost intimidating sensation of having been hijacked. Their Zionist guides wouldn’t leave them alone for a minute. Loud and hyperactive, they had all looked alike, too: suntanned, energetic, and arrogant, their voices laced with disdainful laughter. They all sported the same awkward style, as if it were a uniform: an open shirt whose collar was folded, for some reason, over that of a cheap sports jacket that never matched their pants. Their self-confidence bordered on the pathological; they listened to no sentence to its end. Sweepingly dismissive, they appeared to doubt the masculinity of anyone who wasn’t an Israeli and expected the women in the group, having met real men at last, to fall into their arms like ripe fruit. Their speech sounded prepackaged, its scolding superiority based on an absurdly simplistic conception of something called “the Jewish soul”—a formula composed in equal parts of guilt, sentimental nostalgia, and a no less mawkish nationalism. While this approach might have worked with the generation of their parents, it left Andy and his friends cold. They did not feel guilty about anything, disdained patriotic rhetoric, and had no ready-made Jewish sentiments to play on. The transparent emotional blackmail practiced by their hosts aroused their scorn, which they expressed in their wry North American manner by referring to them all by a single Israeli name, Avi: “The Avi is waiting by the bus.” “The Avi wants us here at five.”

  It was a form of passive, unspoken resistance to the crudeness of it all. For three weeks they followed their guides like sleepwalkers, stooped beneath a fiery sun, their weary eyes fixed on the ground as if refusing to partake in the visions imposed on them by their tireless hosts, straggling beneath an incandescent sky, stopping abruptly from time to time, like the jostled sheep of a capricious shepherd, beside some ancient column that supported nothing, or the soot-blackened floor of what had once been something and would surely be it again, since history demanded no less of us! For a while, a few of them made the effort to listen to the loud, heavily accented explanations of that day’s Avi, but eventually they, too, gave up trying to follow or find meaning in any of it and let themselves be herded, stupefied and indifferent, from one scalding archaeological ruin to the next.

  The Arabs they met were small, dark, and defeated-looking. They spoke a broken English and never looked their conquerors’ American guests in the eye. Yet while the body language of the older ones suggested an absolute, almost inhuman submission, the younger ones exhibited the first stirrings of rebellion. Once, by a roadside souvenir stand, an Arab boy, unable to resist, had reached out to pinch the bare thigh of a blond female student wearing shorts. Their Israeli guide fell upon him, slapped him roundly, and berated him in a Hebrew hoarse with rage. The boy cringed like a frightened animal, and his father, the stand’s owner, began slapping him, too. It wasn’t clear whether he did so simply to appease the enraged tour guide or in order to shield his trembling son from the arrogant stranger’s aggression with his own, familiar one.

  And there was another memory, too, a wondrous one, of a round red moon rising from the desert and hovering very close to the Dome of the Rock, which looked like a mysterious, blood-orange, lunar apparition itself. The sacred mount, with its large mosques couched like magnificent, dusty old lions, exerted a strange pull. Yet this enchanted moment, too, was dissipated by the stench of the Old City. The food was greasy, the showers were cold, the hotel corridors crawled with cockroaches. Even the hash was different from the mellow pot Andrew was used to smoking back home. Heavy, wet, and sticky, it tasted like the thick tongue of the girl from Brooklyn, who had all but forced him to half undress her one night, a charm necklace strung with Stars of David, crosses, and crescent moons suspended between her heavy breasts.

  Since then, he had been to Jerusalem many times as a guest of the Hebrew University, the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Conference Center, and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Yet though most of these visits had gone well, the alienation of those three awful weeks remained in the back of his mind, and after the outbreak of the First Intifada he had taken fewer trips to Israel. As the Jewish state began losing its legitimacy in the family of nations, his attitude toward it, particularly in regard to its treatment of the Palestinians, became increasingly ambivalent. Even after the signing of the Oslo Agreement, he repeatedly found himself shying away from invitations to various lectures and conferences there. And this time there was no need for excuses. His new appointment would take effect in early September, leaving his schedule too crowded for a trip to Israel.

  He slipped the invitation back into its envelope. On Monday, he would ask Ms. Harty to decline, with regrets, on his behalf.

  4

  October 27, 2000

  The 28th of Tishrei, 5761

  Nearly noon. Ann Lee, in a good-natured, perfect parody of Andrew’s gentlemanly manners, insisted on going to get the car. In return, Andrew, still luxuriating in the laziness of the weekend morning, handed her the keys with mock fatherly hesitation, drily spoofing the latent oedipality of their relationship. For a few more minutes, he remained seated on the brown leather couch, paging through the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday Times. Then, f
inishing his second cup of coffee, he went downstairs with the bags and gifts. The lobby was deserted. Andrew peered out at the street. Ann Lee must have forgotten where she had parked the car, or else stopped to buy something. Still drowsy and loath to part with the cozy quiet of the lingering morning, he smiled at the doorman’s greeting without making his usual attempt at small talk and absentmindedly studied the decorative bosses on the walls and ceilings.

  They would be driving upstate, to the small house two hours from the city in which Ann Lee’s mother, Donna, and her new husband lived. Ann Lee’s father, a Chinese American artist, had been living in California for the past eight years with a woman twenty years his junior, with whom he had a daughter younger than Alison. The stated purpose of the trip was to bask in the glory of the autumn foliage, which was particularly spectacular in the Catskills, and though it was already two weeks past its prime, Ann Lee refused to attribute any other motive, obvious or hidden, to their excursion. Who would believe that they had been together for seven, almost eight months?

  The quick, cheerful honk of a horn roused Andrew from his reverie. Smiling vivaciously, Ann Lee was waving through the car window.

  A deep gray sky hung low over the Hudson, caught on the crags of the Palisades. Ann Lee drove easily, humming an unidentifiable tune, one hand on the steering wheel and the other playing lightly on Andrew’s thigh as if it were a piano. Andrew smiled down at the strumming hand before trapping it in his own larger and older one. They were both in a strangely quiet, dreamy mood. As they neared the bridge, Ann Lee removed her hand from Andrew’s knee, leaving behind a residue of warmth, gripped the wheel firmly, and nimbly maneuvered their little car in and out of the exits and overpasses that led to the northbound thruway. Quickly, they passed the monotonous projects of the South Bronx with their windowless buildings that looked more like factories than residences. Ann Lee tuned into some jazz on the radio, its ragtime contrasting with the depressing grayness around them. Lulled by the rhythm of the music and the monotonous hum of the motor, Andrew leaned back against the headrest. The last urban construction yielded to the more vivid rural scenery of the towns along the Hudson. Together with the jazz and the hum of the motor, the Westchester landscape invoked dim, dreamlike memories. He felt a thick, dark, maple-syrupy nostalgia for something indefinable. You know how proud your father is of you, don’t you? The soft, gray wool sweater snugly fit Walter’s broad chest and straight back, his always straight back, as if he had taken a deep, proud breath and would not let go of it.

  “Hi, Andrew, rise and shine! We’re almost there.” Ann Lee’s voice made him sit up with a start. He turned to her, blinking. She smiled back. “Were you sleeping?” He ran a hand over his face and through his hair, checking to see if it needed combing. “Not really. Well, yes. Maybe a bit.”

  They had been driving for an hour. Though the road the car was climbing was unromantically wide, their surroundings grew wilder as it got steeper. Once they were over the top of the mountain, the American continent, vast and endless, came into view. Strangely menacing, the somber tower of Mohonk Mountain House rose from jagged peaks, a fit home for a prince of darkness. The atmosphere in the car had changed, too. There was now a tension in the air. The lively jazz that had accompanied them most of the way was gone, its place taken by nameless, small-town stations whose grim religious preachers and twangy country music came and went. Although she could have played a tape, Ann Lee, suddenly brooding, kept both hands tightly on the wheel and let the radio blare away inanely, its chaotic farrago of noise reflecting her state of mind, which worsened as the familiar comfort of the city receded. She had deliberately, it suddenly struck Andrew, worn the least attractive of her everyday clothes, as if to deprive their visit of any special significance. Her doubts about its wisdom, increasingly evident as they neared their destination, reinforced his own. What was the point of it? Why, all of a sudden, had she wanted him to meet her mother? Without bothering to explain, she had set a date and informed him. Now, though she strove to appear nonchalant, he could tell from her coldness how stressed she was.

  Andrew did his best to be sympathetic and relieve Ann Lee’s anxiety, but she was unresponsive, as if punishing him for the situation that she herself put them in. Her face was contorted, almost pained. She was driving too fast, pulling out to pass every car in front of her. Belted into his seat, he felt helpless, a caricature of the normal, healthy father who drives his daughter’s friend to the train or brings the babysitter home at night. Here, on this highway, removed from the protective bubble of their daily lives, the social categories that distanced them had reasserted themselves. Ann Lee’s youth now struck him as exaggerated, indecent, almost pornographic. His mood darkened. Something nagged at him, a dim sorrow tinged with an edgy sensation he couldn’t explain. Not even the flame of the autumn leaves, which showed them with their full splendor as the car left the highway for a narrow, winding country road, could penetrate the car’s closed windows. That their surroundings looked like a stage set only made their venture more absurd. His nervousness, which might have been likened to that of a boy meeting the parents of a girl he was dating, was in fact the opposite: what had been right and proper at that age now gave him the hollow feeling of something gone unaccountably wrong. The phantom college professor and his student flickered in his consciousness and vanished, leaving a bitter, medicinal aftertaste.

  His main concern, he was forced to admit, was the approaching encounter with Ann Lee’s stepfather. As irrational as it was disconcerting, it had to be faced. The jealous, judgmental shadow of the father hovered vulture-like over their little car. Although being introduced to Donna’s new husband wasn’t as bad as meeting Ann Lee’s biological father, Andrew didn’t look forward to it. All he knew about the man was that his name was David and that he was an ex-musician now working as a not particularly successful sound technician. As far as Ann Lee was concerned, the marriage, which she rarely talked about, was just another one of her mother’s childish whims. Yet Andrew, who hated the look that he saw in the eyes of whoever, no matter how liberal or progressive, was aware that he, a fifty-two-year-old man, was sleeping with a woman barely half his age. Projected onto him, he felt, were not only sexual fantasies but all the hidden patriarchal defenses of the tribe. It was natural, of course, he thought with a glance at his watch. As if he didn’t have such instincts himself! Two fifteen. How could anyone live so far from the city? The area wasn’t even a pastoral one of white churches, red barns, and farmhouses. It was depressingly poor, dotted with old industrial buildings and decrepit trailers that looked as if they were left over from the Depression era. The opaque, misplaced names on the road signs—Goshen, Rehoboth, Bethel—made the place feel even more oppressive.

  Ann Lee swung the wheel sharply to the right, having nearly missed the turnoff. The car swerved like a tacking boat. On the left, an inscription on a redbrick wall in English and Hebrew said “Eretz HaChayim Cemetery.” Beyond the wall, heavy gray tombstones ran up a hill, their square letters too small to make out from a distance. A Jewish cemetery, here? How come? But of course: they were at the heart of what had once been the Borscht Belt. Still, it was hard to imagine Jewish life (or any life, for that matter) in such a godforsaken place. How awful to die and be buried by the side of a road in the middle of nowhere! What time was it? How much longer, damn it, would it take to get there?

  5

  Donna must have been a beauty when she was young. Even now, in her late forties, she had the good looks of a younger woman. Andrew knew her type: she had the eternally pubescent appearance of a former Flower Child forever arrested in her teens. And there was something else that he was familiar with: a lack of confidence that was tangible in her movements and expressions, the physical apology of a woman, left by a husband after long years of marriage, who never stopped excusing herself even though she was lucky enough to have started a new life with someone else. For a brief, painful moment, the thought of Linda flashed through Andrew’s mind. Donna�
��s smile was too wide, too inviting. No sooner had Donna begun begging them to forgive her husband’s not joining them for lunch than, conscious of the distress emanating from Ann Lee like a cold draft blowing through a broken window, Andrew interrupted her with a disarming smile, took her by the arm, and led her inside as if he, not she, were the host while promising, “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to spend with him.” Ann Lee walked behind them, stunned and lethargic, limply carrying the bags and the wrapped presents.

  Lunch was more suited to summer than to fall: a cold soup, a salad, and a vegetable quiche accompanied by an over-chilled white Burgundy. While Ann Lee fiddled silently with her food and hardly ate anything, Andrew, as though eating for the two of them, kept asking for seconds. The wine, surprisingly, was first-rate. Were Donna and her husband real connoisseurs or had she simply bought something expensive in order to impress him? Andrew and Donna had to talk nonstop to fill the vacuum created by Ann Lee’s silence. Enveloped by the light fumes of the wine, Donna’s behavior at the table, while not exactly flirtatious, excluded Ann Lee and made it seem that she and Andrew were the parents, and Ann Lee their prickly, capricious adolescent daughter. Nodding enthusiastically as he spoke, as if hanging on every word. Compared to an engaging man-of-the-world like himself, he was sure, her husband must seem to her a compromise. Rather than flatter him, however, this thought weighed on him. He tried putting it aside by asking about David’s work, making appreciative sounds as he was told about it. It wasn’t easy. Ann Lee was in a world of her own and left it all up to him. Keeping the conversation going was exhausting. Again and again he found himself glancing at his watch, wondering when he could politely excuse himself and take a nap.