Do You Hear What I Hear?

One December 24, Superstorm Mindy came in from the Atlantic and walloped America. Nowhere got it worse than New York City. That Christmas Eve day, Louise Wexler had planned to ride public transit all the way from her apartment in Philadelphia out to where her father lived on Stony Brook, Long Island: to take the early morning SEPTA from the Thirtieth Street Station to Trenton, there to change over to the NJ Transit track, and then to catch a train to Penn Station. From Penn Station she would ride the Long Island Rail Road to Hicksville, where she’d switch to the double-decker, which would bring her to the second to last stop on its line. Four trains. More than four hours, plus connections. And with a storm coming? Madness.

Louise was a widow, her husband three years dead. She was still struggling to work her way back into the living world. But this, she thought—slipping her Karl Ove Knausgaard into her red corduroy shoulder bag, leaving her apartment as the first misting raindrops fell—this insane trek on grubby trains to a father who showed her no love, this was adolescent. Dr. Jack Wexler, the very thought of him, transformed her into the kind of teenager who, precisely because she did not want to see her father, performed for him the most self-abasing act of obeisance.

Strong winds shook the NJ Transit train as she handed the conductor her ticket. The wheels on the rails creaked like heinous laughter. She was under the Hudson River when the train’s lights went out. My Struggle vanished in her hands. Her hands vanished too. The woman to Louise’s left disappeared, and in the darkness fingers gripped Louise by the wrist.

Louise reached into her corduroy bag for her phone. She had no reception. No one had any reception. People started screaming. In the darkness she thought again of Abel Gruber. Was she going to be alone for the rest of her life?

Louise first met Abel Gruber at Larry Josefson’s wedding, Labor Day weekend, three months earlier. She’d been an idiot to go to the wedding. Why had she thought she could handle it? She was late, of course, and sat in the back row, in the last of the straight-backed chairs with the little white cushions. People turned around to see, but Louise kept her eyes down. Someone read, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” Louise’s stomach lurched. The happy couple stepped on a light bulb wrapped in a napkin. Everyone screamed, “Mazel tov!” Everyone but Louise, who ducked out the back, past the waitstaff with their trays of bubbly wine in flutes. When the party started moving toward the reception area, toward the canapés and the bar, Louise made a second move, to an empty room, and there was Abel Gruber.

He was tall, he was young, he was sad and poetical. He stood with his back to one of the manor’s floor-to-ceiling windows. The window framed him, like he was a bug in a specimen case.

When she and Timothy Teitlebaum had married, Louise hadn’t wanted any ceremony. Their gay friends couldn’t get married, she said, and it didn’t seem decent to participate in a rite (a right?) which their friends were denied. Besides, marriage was both feudal and bourgeois, less about love than about property rights, and couldn’t that just be dealt with at city hall? Tim, twelve years older than she and a professor of constitutional law, hadn’t taken women’s studies courses in college. He said that marriage was a ceremonial affirmation of life, the opposite of a funeral. In tragedy everyone died, he said, in comedy everyone got married.

“You think this is comedy?” asked Louise.

Tim could read Greek. In the horror of the world, he insisted, you had to have art, you had to have music, you had to have two lovers kissing before a crowd and everyone clapping. For their wedding, someone wanted to read, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” and Tim nixed it.

“True minds?” he said. “Impediment?” Did no one get the irony in the poem?

She said, okay, then what did Tim recommend, Shakespeare-wise.

“Oh wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful,” he said. “And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping.”

He was pale and would comb strands of hair across his head, even after she told him please not to. He was very, very shy. His smile just killed her. Louise wasn’t the type to go swashbuckling into the Forest of Arden, but Tim had cast her as his Rosalind, so, okay, a big theatrical marriage in a club by Rittenhouse Square, as if it were Act V. But it hadn’t been Act V. There was no grand finale. Tim was dead and now she had to play this role—the widow at Larry Josefson’s wedding.

I’m so sorry for your loss, they all had said at Tim’s funeral. Why were they apologizing, she wondered, and what was with that possessive pronoun? As if it were some faux pas, the ruin of her life like a run in her stocking. If this guy by the window didn’t already know about Tim being dead, she decided, she wasn’t going to tell him. She was not going to introduce herself as a widow. Not this time. She was in disguise.

Abel must have been twenty years younger than she. He was all long bones under his suit, long fingers of his right hand protruding from the cuff of his shirt, Beatle bangs and a nose like Ringo’s and dark circles under his sunken eyes. He was genuinely upset. Apparently, the bride was asking him to play the piano.

“Why’s that a problem?” asked Louise.

“This?” Abel raised his left hand.

It wasn’t a hand. Or it was a hand, but by contortion the fingers had transformed themselves into something else entirely, a thicket, the winter twigs of a thornbush.

Later, what she could not recall—could not recapture—was a sense of time, of darkness, of duration. Faces lit cinematically by their useless phones, so that the man across the aisle, his face emerging from the darkness in the glow of his screen, looked like John Garfield in a Santa hat. Being stuck underground like this was the opposite of a meditation class, she thought, everyone has to sit and panic. Was that a joke? Was she telling herself jokes? The armor of one’s personality: Wasn’t that a phrase from Wilhelm Reich, one of the great historical loonies of psychoanalysis? She was a hollow knight now, the armor of her supposed life clanking around without her.

The woman in the window seat next to her was lost in shadow and kept clinging to Louise’s wrist and muttering. Was it in German? Louise imagined that the old woman was telling her intimate things, prayers, her children’s names, her late husband’s psychosis, the gifts she was carrying to her great-granddaughter, all in some other language—no, not German, maybe Hungarian?

The men in yellow vests arrived, and soon they were evacuating the train, waving lanterns, leading everyone through the long tunnel to Manhattan. Louise feared the rats and the drips and the puddles and the streams and the electricity of the tracks. She didn’t pray, exactly. She talked to Tim: What are the odds, my love, that we’ll all get drowned, that we’ll get incinerated?

“Simmer down, Louie.” That’s what he had said in the hospital, the very last day, when she tried to read him his favorite scene, the one in The Winter’s Tale where the statue comes to life. “If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating,” he had said to her, under the marriage canopy, and her whole chest fluttered with lust. The old woman still clung to her now, still murmured importunities and prayers as they walked. Was it Czech? There was a waterfall. Largely sewage, Louise guessed. They had to go under it, and Louise’s green puffy coat absorbed the mess.

Up a small metal stairway to a train platform, and then the lights came on—and voilà, a man was holding Louise’s arm, not a woman at all, and he wasn’t speaking German or Hungarian or even Czech. “Oh, my dear!” He was rather formal, in a ruined suit and a battered hat, and he kissed her knuckle as he let go of her. All down the platform stood families in matching reindeer sweaters. Weirdly, she thought she saw him standing there, handsome young Abel Gruber—but no, it wasn’t him.

“She thinks she can fix me. She can’t,” Abel had said, in September at the wedding where they first met. She was his sister, Trudie, the bride. “I never played things like this, ever. Even when I was a teenager. It’s nerve damage, they just haven’t figured it out yet. And she’s scouring my psychology—I’ve never in my life had performance anxiety. She talks about my libido, the traumas of my youth. If that’s the case, why did I get so much relief with the botulism shot?”

He talked and talked. It seemed like they could live together for years, and he would never ask one question about her. It was great! She was incognito, no widow in his eyes.

They exited the mansion, each bearing a glass of champagne and a bamboo skewer of chicken—Abel fitting the skewer into his fixed and unrelenting claw—and they wandered the grounds. White clouds of clematis hung from stone walls above the Labor Day roses. The New Jersey State Botanical Garden—who knew? She had on lipstick and eyeshadow. He was at Yale now, studying to be a composer. They were all idiots at Yale, careerists. They didn’t know a thing about music.

“She says I don’t want to get better, and maybe I don’t.” Trudie was somewhere in the manor, maybe getting hoisted on a chair in poofy white, costumed as if to be deflowered by Larry Josefson. “Maybe it’s best if I just accept it. This is who I am.”

He wore a beautiful suit. Louise finished her champagne, and her lips swelled as if to be kissed. He didn’t kiss her.

In Penn Station, her phone reconnected with its network, and there was a pile of texts: one from her congresswoman, one from her father, and one (surprise!) from Abel Gruber. Hope you didn’t go running out in the storm. Louise felt that hot flutter in her chest. She typed out I wish I were home with you. Then she deleted that, and sent instead: I did. I’m all wee. Then she sent, by way of correction, Wet. She put the phone in her bag, so she wouldn’t stare at it anxiously for his reply. Her father, writing as if the only important catastrophes were his, had written, Important will you be arriving by 4PM respond!!! She didn’t respond. Janitors squeegeed the floor, pushing outflow back toward the bathrooms. All around, music played: Giddy yap, giddy yap, giddy yap, let’s go.

Her LIRR train stalled above Queens at sunset. Louise could see the uprooted trees down below, ripped out by the wind. Her green puffy coat smelled funky, and its odor comingled with the scent of the french fries of the young woman beside her, who was dipping her fries in mayonnaise. In the heat of the car, the Christmastime crowd baked like so many hams and yams and turkeys. Her father texted again: Amended status, exit train at Hicksville I will be there!!! Louise began writing back, he shouldn’t worry, no need to pick her up. Before she could hit send, up popped a GIF from Abel, Mariah Carey dancing in a short skirt and Santa hat.

It had been in mid-September, some two weeks after Labor Day, that Abel called her. He would be coming from New Haven to Philadelphia for a conference in October. Maybe she had time for a drink? Could he text closer to the date, Louise had said, and she could see if something could fit in? In truth, her days were gray with inactivity. She didn’t have a job, lived on Tim’s retirement money. She had moved a year ago. She’d wake up, she’d look at the unpacked boxes of their life, and get back into bed.

There are no words, people had said in the first months after he died. Now they seemed to think the words were Tim died three years ago, and seemed to think that it was Louise alone who could not comprehend that sentence, like she needed John Cleese to explain it: He has ceased to be, he’s expired and gone to meet his maker, he’s a stiff, bereft of life, he rests in peace—if you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies. That’s why she had left their apartment, so as not to have his toothbrush—nailed to its perch, as it were—there to stab herself with every morning, just in case she wanted to gouge out her eyes. She imagined explaining this to Abel Gruber. No, no matter what, she had decided, before they had even had a date, no matter what she would never tell him about Tim, she would never reveal that Tim was dead.

Abel called again, just days after his first awkward phone call, as if someone (Trudie?) had coached him. He named a night, first weekend in October, a time, and a restaurant.

She said, “I’d love to.”

Why did she say that? What had come over her?

For the first year, she had longed for a black dress and a veil, a closet filled with widow’s weeds. But she arrived for her date with freshly shaved legs, wearing pumps and sheer stockings. She felt undercover, which was a little bit (she could not believe this) sexy. Before she left, she took down the marriage photo of her and Tim in the foyer, also she hid the picture of teenaged Tim. Just in case, she thought. Abel seemed to have a lot going for him: He was young, he was far away in New Haven, he was wrapped up in his own mishigas, there was no emotional connection needed or maybe even possible. He didn’t have to see pictures of Tim.

Grief was adolescence, grief was old age. Her body and mind shifted, transformed, constantly, month by month. For the first year, she could not read. It wasn’t until the second that she went to a concert. Who was this woman now, anyhow, smiling and unfolding her napkin on a date with a man-child? Apparently, she was the woman who asked about his conference, and listened to his complaints. He hated musicologists.

In her bedroom, they rolled around a little. Abel stripped down to his T-shirt and boxers, and stared out the window.

“I just,” he said. “I can’t.”

“You can go back to your hotel if you want to,” Louise said, pulling the sheets over her breasts.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

He sat down on the bed. She said, “Don’t you have a paper to deliver tomorrow?”

“Oh, fuck that!” His voice squeaked.

Then he went to sleep. She could not sleep. In the morning, she found the lube that she had just yesterday purchased, she grabbed his hard-on, she unrolled the Trojan, and very businesslike, straddled him. “Wake up,” she said. She was going to get this done, carry her ruse to its end. But then Abel Gruber came to life. He flipped her over. Oh, that piano player! He had rhythm, he could do frills, one heck of an accompanist, and she found herself yodeling out the lead.

He was so handsome, naked in the breakfast nook. She poured him coffee. He reached out and took it with his left hand.

“Holy shit,” said Louise.

Abel put down the coffee. He flexed his fingers, all ten of them in a line.

“Am I going to hear you play the piano?”

His hand balled into a fist, he crumpled. She’d ruined it, said the wrong thing! But then he straightened up and smiled.

“Just joking.”

“Motherfucker,” she called him, but that wasn’t the right word. “You dick.”

He reached out that left hand toward her and he took her by the bathrobe and right there in the kitchen, he did it to her one more time, and she was Toni Tennille, singing with all her teeth, and he was her Captain.

The remnant hurricane air was moist and tropical. In her damp, soiled coat, Louise wandered the parking lot at Hicksville. She could hear her father whistling, two fingers at either end of his mouth. He, aged but alert, stood by his white SUV, which had been decked out by the new wife with antlers on the roof and a red nose on the hood.

Inside his Lexus, “Ode to Joy” played at assault-
ive volume. His face was lined and creased, his hair thin and white, but he still drove like terror, tailgating, flashing lights, passing on the right. He barked at her. “Mary Ellen made a Christmas pudding!” What Louise did with her father, since adolescence, was silence, and the pretense that all this was perfectly normal. He had his lips zipped and his eyes on the road, and so Louise played the part of the tween, and went back to texting Abel. I’ll be in Philly tomorrow for Christmas, she wrote, thinking it was an invitation. He replied, I’m going nowhere. Did Abel mean he had no plans, or did he mean no way was he heading to Philly? Her father took a wicked turn, the right wheels of the Lexus rising. Louise took a deep breath. She wrote, I would like to see you. But she didn’t hit send.

In the big living room, on the largest TV screen Louise had ever seen, a vast lineman wearing red and white crushed a tragic quarterback in gold and green. Leaping up from the sectional was the sea god Poseidon, yellow locks halfway down his back, muscled arms raised to celebrate his team. This was Mary Ellen’s brother, Cornelius. What was he, half her age?

“Merry Christmas,” said Louise. She had forgotten to bring presents for his kids.

I’m so sorry for your loss, they all had said at Tim’s funeral. Why were they apologizing, she wondered, and what was with that possessive pronoun? As if it were some faux pas, the ruin of her life like a run in her stocking.

For their second date (third if you counted the wedding), Louise had ridden two commuter lines, changing from SEPTA to NJT in Trenton, and then taking the A train down to Canal Street. She looked at herself in the window of the subway, and mouthed the words Tim, dead, and widow. No. Not gonna tell him. Nope.

She got to the club in Tribeca, and there he was, in another beautiful suit, sitting at the piano. His hair had grown out since the wedding, from Rubber Soul to the White Album. On his long jaw was the hint of a beard. Carrie Atwood (“Cabaret Legend,” said the sign) was a superannuated, expensively dyed blonde who failed to achieve attractiveness no matter how her white arms insisted on it, and the upper register of her voice was shot. Abel, on the other hand, was a genius. His intros were softball pitches, anyone could hit that song out of the park. His solos framed her scat singing and made it shine. After the gig, they were necking on a corner on Duane Street. Teenagers in fishnets screamed, “Get a room!” So they did.

In a hotel overlooking the river (he put it on his Amex; was he secretly rich?), Louise did a pretty fair Carrie Atwood impression. She was exhausted after the second time they did it, and lying beside her, he asked what her plans were for Christmas.

“Moping in Philadelphia, most likely,” she said, and covered her face with a pillow.

“You saved my life,” Abel said. “From now on, this is what I want to do. Play piano and be with you.”

She whimpered.

When he took the pillow off her face, Abel saw that she was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“I’m not freaked out,” Louise said. “I’m a widow.”

“A what?” Abel was baffled.

“It means I’m grieving for my dead husband.”

“Seriously?” he stammered.

“You want to look it up?”

She called him an asshole. He put on his pants. And when he was gone, she was bawling.

They didn’t have another date after that, but in early December, he had texted her Hey there, and she had texted back Hiya. She had asked if he had any upcoming gigs, he had replied by asking about her Christmas plans. Going to see my father for Christmas Eve, she’d written. I hate my father, Abel wrote back. To which she’d replied, We have more in common than I’d guessed!

“It’s Christmastime,” Cornelius whined into his cell phone. “Give the custody agreement a rest.”

At dinner, he screamed at his kids—they could have been her grandchildren, Louise thought, if she had gotten cooking early. Dr. Jack Wexler screamed at his wife, who could have been Louise’s classmate. She put her hand on Louise.

“I’m so sorry.” She bit her lower lip.

Cornelius’s twin girls, Kyla and Kayla, asked why their aunt was apologizing. Dr. Jack Wexler explained.

“His name was Tom Tittleman,” said her father. “He was a history teacher.”

“No words,” said Mary Ellen. Then, brightening, “Pudding?”

Louise stood. In the bathroom, she bit her right hand. She counted to ten. She grabbed her bag and bolted. The arctic air was back. Its fierce wind frosted the grass. Louise texted Abel and invited him for Christmas dinner, tomorrow. Six o’clock, she typed, my place, Philly? She checked the LIRR schedule. There was not another Stony Brook train for an hour. But in twenty-three minutes, toward the southern side of the island, a westbound train was departing from Ronkonkoma. Louise summoned a cab. Her damp smelly coat hung in her father’s closet.

She didn’t realize she’d lost her phone until the train pulled out of Wyandanch, not yet halfway back to the city. Was her phone on the floor of the cab, or on the platform of the Ronkonkoma Station? She had taken it out to tip her driver and Abel had responded to her invitation with a photograph. A sea creature? Something he had baked? Then, she thought, oh! How to respond to that? Tim had never sent her that sort of thing.

She imagined her phone ringing on the train platform, in the back of a cab, or in the hands of a crook who knew how to break into her Apple Pay. How to interpret that photograph: I would be delighted to spend the holiday with you? How was she to have replied? A thumbs-up emoji? A heart? Not with silence, that was for sure.

She had blown it.

Louise arrived at Penn Station, and she thought it was the most depressing place in the world, but had to revise that opinion when she changed trains in Trenton, where nothing was moving. Midnight ice covered all the rails, trains were stalled up and down New Jersey, and a man was pissing on the multidenominational holiday display. Philadelphia at dawn felt like civilization’s end. There were icicles in Louise’s hair. No internet connection, the storm had wiped that out in her building, so no way of getting in touch with Abel. Her bedroom windows had been left open. Her sheets and her comforter were damp.

This was the ruin, she thought, that had become her life.

In the shower, Louise’s fingers and toes came slowly, painfully back to life. She huddled in her stripped bed, naked under an old wool coat.

At five thirty on Christmas Day, she dressed herself, optimistically, as if her date would come. She set the table with candlesticks. Delusional. Abel was no doubt sending her texts, calling her, and since she never responded, he was probably still home in New Haven. At seven, she tried to cook, burning frozen shrimp in the broiler. She had to stand on a chair to take down the smoke detector, and meanwhile her ravioli came unglued. Squares of pasta writhed in the boiling water, spreading contrails of mushroom and cheese. The noodles in the colander looked like vomit. In a bowl, they looked like vomit and burnt shrimp. At a quarter to eight, she was old and gray and swollen-faced—there she was, the haggard widow in the bathroom mirror. It was a good thing Abel wasn’t coming. Louise got back in bed.

Without her phone, without the internet, there was no music in the house. Tim’s records were boxed. Thelonious Monk. John Coltrane. Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. Steamin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. His ashes were in an urn in another taped-shut U-Haul box. “Simmer down, Louie,” she told herself. The windows rattled, the wind curling around street corners. It keened. It sucked. It howled.

Louise wished she had studied meteorology in college. Other people worried about the waters’ rise, Florida sinking, or drought, the Colorado River basin turned into desert. She feared waterspouts and cyclones. The great airstreams of the planet gone all cuckoo, the circulating winds thrown into arrhythmia. Flames in California, soot blown to New York City. Tornados in Manhattan, glass shards showering Passaic. She had been so scared yesterday in that tunnel, with the stranger gripping her hand. The night they had met, Tim had draped an overcoat over her shoulders. She’d been in a sleeveless dress on the lawn, watching stars in New Jersey at Larry Josefson’s holiday party, and only Tim had thought to wear his winter coat outside, and then he saw her shiver. It was a knightly gesture, and was accompanied by that nerdy, innocent smile, and she knew before he kissed her that this short Jewish guy was her Galahad. Or was Galahad the chaste one? Maybe Tim was her Lancelot? But Lancelot fucked his best friend’s wife. No, Tim was better than both. He was her own Timothy Teitlebaum, Denton-Hurst Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Unbidden, an image came to her, the twin globes of the pale ass of the man who had been micturating last night on the SEPTA system’s nondenominational holiday display, casting his urine on the reindeer and the menorah and the kinara. Maybe he was a Christ-in-Christmas kind of guy? Long ago, at the beginning of Louise’s career as an adjunct first-year composition instructor, she had assigned Othello in her basic writing class, and none of the kids had any idea what any of it meant.

The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose
As asses are.

Which a student whose first language wasn’t English had paraphrased, “there is nothing more honest than showing someone your ass.” Tim had loved that. When they met at the wedding, Abel Gruber had shown her his wounds, raised that horrid hand against a clear blue sky, and he was drawn to her because she had listened to him.

She should have studied neurology. The mind was bizarre circuitry, electric currents through the mush of brain. Abel had suffered some disconnect between head and hand, and then her menopausal vagina had kissed his priapic cock, and even through the latex shield, had performed magic. The hand that had folded in on itself could grab a cup of coffee, could go through the chord changes of E-flat minor, and he had fallen for her further, yet she had kept herself aloof. She had spent her life pretending that Dr. Jack Wexler’s indifference toward her was no big deal. And then Tim had come, and balmed the pain of that indifference. Louise whispered, “Bring him back, bring him back, bring him back.” The rattling of the window was the only answer to her cry.

And who exactly was she crying out for, Abel or Tim or—no, definitely not Dr. Jack Wexler. Thump, thump, thump, went the window, a hollow sound. Oh, how she wished she had had children! It would have made all the difference in her grief to have someone to care for, and then to have someone to tend to her as she became helpless in her age. Louise lifted her head. That thumping was not the windowpane.

She stood. She went to the bathroom mirror. Her dress was wrinkled, her hair a fright, her mascara had run, she had nothing to serve. It was a rhythm, that thumping, two hands on wood. On the mantel was the picture of Tim from the Bronx High School of Science yearbook, bow tie and early seventies hair. In the front hall was the picture of the two of them dancing in front of a band—Tim had amazingly surprisingly swiveling hips. Louise breathed in. She breathed out.

She put her hand on the doorknob. Was it really Abel Gruber, arrived at last? She was ready to tell him anything. She was ready to be kissed.