in the pile there was not one from Reza, so none that I wanted.)
It would have been the perfect day to go to the studio, where Emily D’s solitary bedroom awaited my solitary attentions. Instead, I slipped out of Appleton without saying good-bye, dropped my things at home and went to the matinee of Closer, a movie with Jude Law and Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts and Clive Owen that made me feel a hundred years old and completely alone in the universe.
My dad was feeling under the weather, and this helped me. He’s simultaneously stoical and hypochondriacal, my father: he’ll be trumpeting ostentatiously into his linen handkerchief while insisting that nothing’s the matter—his voice a croak, his eyes red-rimmed and filmy—and then suddenly he’ll wave his fork at you and confide, alongside the jiggling speared sausage or lettuce leaf, that he’s read in the Mayo Clinic newsletter about an underreported but devastating viral bronchitis, every symptom for which he seems to have; or about the warning signs for prostate cancer that have him worried about how often he urinates (he never says “pees”); or about adult-onset diabetes that could explain why he seems so often to take an afternoon nap. He doesn’t want you to feel concern about his symptoms but would like you to be aware, as he is aware, that at any and all times he is, or may be, stepping closer to death.
I went with him right after school ended to the old Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. We were supposed to attend a concert in their cavernous music room, a string quartet on a wooden dais in front of two hundred retirees and music nerds in rustling coats in the dark in the middle of the day; but he decided at the last minute that his cold symptoms—a vigorous postnasal drip that had him constantly clearing his throat, a stream of catarrh that required much nose blowing—would spoil the experience both for him and for the rest of the audience. So instead we wandered the galleries with their familiar contents, tiptoeing among the masterpieces that seemed still to have Isabella’s dominating fingerprints upon them, all the way up to the room at the top where she herself, immortalized by Sargent, proud and myopic, stood guard over her domain. Afterward, we scurried down to the tearoom to get a table ahead of the concertgoers. My father, who in age has developed a sweet tooth, ordered hot chocolate and a cake.
“Your mother loved this place,” he observed, as he always did, as though that were reason enough to come.
“The tearoom, you mean?”
“The whole thing. That courtyard. All those ferns. She loved that. Whenever we came, she’d say so.”
“Do you love it too?”
“Bit dark for me. Nice art, but it’s all jumbled up. Seems like it needs a good spring cleaning.”
“We didn’t have to come here, you know.”
He shook his head, even as he was blowing his nose. I could see a small crusty scab on his bald pate: another skin cancer that would have to be burned off. “It’s good for me. I know that.”
“What, culture?”
“It was your mother who loved these things. But it’s important to do them sometimes, even if you don’t love them. And it’s nice to be with you.”
“I don’t get it. Why’s it important? If you don’t enjoy it, then why, especially at your age …”
“At that point, why anything, Nora? Don’t be silly. You get dressed because you get dressed. You don’t ask if you enjoy it. You eat most meals because a body’s got to eat. And it’s the same with the museums: once in a while, you’ve got to do it.”
“Standards? You’re saying it’s about keeping up standards? That seems weird to me.”
“Is this interesting, Nora?”
“To me it is. You’re saying that you should do things as if you cared about them, even when you don’t?”
“Sometimes you might learn something.” He fumbled at a bit of cake that had fallen from his fork. “Life isn’t just about doing things you enjoy, you know.”
“God knows I know that. But the museum isn’t like, I don’t know, property taxes or anything. It’s supposed to be a pleasure.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t pleasurable.”
“Yes you did. You implied it. I mean, we could go to the movies, or whatever, instead.”
“Nora, why are you doing this? Can’t we have our cocoa and talk about nice things? How was the Christmas assembly with the kids?”
“Holiday assembly. Nobody says ‘Christmas’ anymore, Dad. It was fine. I’ll leave