A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [94]
“Does it make you happy?” he countered.
The door shook on its hinges.
As Ted sat, feeling the evolution of the afternoon, he found himself thinking of Susan. Not the slightly different version of Susan, but Susan herself—his wife—on a day many years ago, before Ted had begun folding up his desire into the tiny shape it had become. On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, “Let’s make sure it’s always like this.” And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, “Always. It will always be like this.”
Recently, he’d mentioned that trip in some other context, and Susan had looked him full in the face and chimed, in her sunny new voice, “Are you sure that was me? I don’t remember a thing about it!” and administered a springy little kiss to the top of Ted’s head. Amnesia, he’d thought. Brainwashing. But it came to him now that Susan had simply been lying. He’d let her go, conserving himself for—what? It frightened Ted that he had no idea. But he’d let her go, and she was gone.
“Are you there?” Sasha called, but he didn’t answer.
She threw open the door and peered out. “You are,” she said, with relief. Ted looked up at her from the floor and said nothing. “You can come inside, I guess,” she said.
He hauled himself to his feet and stepped into her room. It was tiny: a narow bed, a desk, a sprig of mint in a plastic cup filling the room with its scent. The red dress, hanging from a hook. The sun was just beginning to set, skidding over rooftops and church steeples and landing in the room through a single window by the bed. Its sill was crowded with what appeared to be souvenirs of Sasha’s travels: a tiny gold pagoda, a guitar pick, a long white seashell. In the middle of the window, dangling from a string, hung a crude circle made from a bent coat hanger. Sasha sat on her bed, watching Ted take in her meager possessions. He recognized, with merciless clarity, what he’d somehow failed to grasp yesterday: how alone his niece was in this foreign place. How empty-handed.
As if sensing the movement of his thoughts, Sasha said, “I get to know a lot of people. But it never really lasts.”
On the desk lay a small stack of books in English: The History of the World in 24 Lessons. The Sumptuous Treasures of Naples. At the top, a worn volume entitled Learning to Type.
Ted sat on the bed beside his niece and put his arm around her shoulders. They felt like birds’ nests under his coat. The prickling sensation ached in his nostrils.
“Listen to me, Sasha,” he said. “You can do it alone. But it’s going to be so much harder.”
She didn’t answer. She was looking at the sun. Ted looked, too, staring through the window at the riot of dusty color. Turner, he thought. O’Keeffe. Paul Klee.
On another day more than twenty years after this one, after Sasha had gone to college and settled in New York; after she’d reconnected on Facebook with her college boyfriend and married late (when Beth had nearly given up hope) and had two children, one of whom was slightly autistic; when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorced—a grandfather—would visit Sasha at home in the California desert. He would step through a living room strewn with the flotsam of her young kids and watch the western sun blaze through a sliding glass door. And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.
Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame