Now, at the thought of Lianne’s face, finely lined, touched by faint surprise as it was whenever she opened her eyes in the morning, Epstein felt a stab of pain. It had always annoyed him, this expression of her bewilderment. He woke to the day, into argument, having rehearsed his position all night in his sleep, but she slept and forgot, and woke perplexed. Why was she not more like him? He remembered how, on the night he’d told her that he could no longer carry on in their marriage, Lianne had said that he wasn’t himself. That he was still reeling from his parents’ deaths, and that it wasn’t the time to do anything rash. But by the way her eye twitched, he’d understood that she knew something not even he yet fully grasped. That she was the opposite of bewildered, and had come to her own conclusions. Something had needed to break, and he felt it then, the fragile bones snapping one by one under his fingers. He hadn’t guessed it would be like that. He had imagined it as a huge, nearly impossible labor, but it took almost nothing. So light, so delicate a thing was a marriage. Had he known, would he have been more careful all these years? Or would he have broken it long ago?
The steaming dishes were brought out from the Gilgul kitchen. In a burned pan, a whole chicken lay plucked and yellow, bubbling in its own fat. Epstein half wondered whether Klausner would tear off the thighs and toss them around the table, too. But one of the girls, a lesbian by the look of it, applied herself to it with a carving knife. A plate was passed down the table to Epstein, piled high with meat and potatoes. He’d barely eaten since his near drowning. His stomach couldn’t take it. On account of what? Swallowing a bit of sea? From beyond the grave, his mother laid into him. What was wrong with him? The smoke from an eternal cigarette swirled around her. He used to have a stomach of steel! He took down a swallow of sour wine and set into the greasy chicken. Bracing himself, he stuffed it down. It was just a question of mental exertion over the body. Long ago, when Jonah and Lucie were still young, he’d received a diagnosis of malignant melanoma. A small mole on his chest had begun to change color with the leaves one autumn. But when the doctor scratched it off and sent it to the lab, the news came back that it was his death that had been growing there, unfurling its colors. There was a 10 percent survival rate, the doctor reported grimly. In the meantime, there was nothing to be done. Leaving the office and walking down Central Park West in the invigorating sunlight, a trembling Epstein had made a decision: he would live. He told no one of the diagnosis, not even Lianne. And he never went back to see the doctor again. The years passed and passed, and the little white scar on his chest faded and became imperceptible. His death became imperceptible. Once, passing the forgotten address, his eye had caught on the doctor’s name on the brass placard, and a chill had gone through him. He pulled his scarf around his neck and laughed it away. Mind over matter! Yes, he had cured himself of a lisp, cured himself of weaknesses, of failures, of exhaustions, of all manner of inability, and as if that were not enough, he had gone and cured himself of cancer. A stomach of steel and an iron will. Where there was a wall, he had gone through. Surely he could get his dinner down, despite the nausea he felt chewing it.
And so it went, so that it was not until much later—for the eating went on a long time, and then there was still the singing led by Klausner, who brought the group to finale with a loud, rhythmic thumping with his giant palm on the table, rattling the plates and silverware—that a full Epstein, unable to bear the churning in his gut any longer, rose and, groping down the dark hallway in search of a bathroom, came upon her.
The door had been left ajar, and through it warm light tumbled out across the hall. Approaching, he heard the gentle ripple of water. He did not think of turning away. It was not his nature to turn away, he had always been too curious, had taken the world as something given him to see all of. But when he peered through the opening, what he saw sent a surge of feeling through him. He gripped his stomach and held his breath, but the young woman sitting in the bath with her chin resting on her knees must have sensed his presence, because slowly, almost leisurely, without lifting her head, she turned her face. Her black hair, cut above the nape, fell back from her ear, and her eyes came calmly to rest on him. Her gaze was so direct and startling that he felt it as a rupture. Along seams that had been waiting to come apart, but it hardly mattered. Shocked, he stepped back, and as he did, he lost his footing. Falling through the dark, he flung out his hands. His palms slapped the wall, and at the sound she jumped up with a splash.
Only then did he realize that she hadn’t seen him at all. Couldn’t have in the dark. But for a moment he had seen all of her, the water streaming in rivulets down her body. Then the door slammed shut.
He felt his gut convulse and fled back down the hall. Coming to the front door, he shoved it open and hurled himself outside. The temperature had dropped, and in the tremendous sky the cold stars had hardened and shone. He tore through the bristled growth, wild and knee-high. A dank vegetative smell rose, released by the broken weeds underfoot. Doubling over, he began to vomit. It came out of him and came out of him, and when he thought it was over, more came. Heaving, purged of his great effort, he saw the cloud of his own breath vanishing up.
He wiped his mouth and straightened, his legs still weak. He should really call a doctor tomorrow. Something wasn’t right. He looked back at the house picked over by moonlight. What was he doing here? He wasn’t himself tonight. Had not been himself, it seemed, for some time. He had taken a rest from being himself. Was that it? A rest from being Epstein? And was it not possible that, resting from his lifelong logic, his epic reason, he had seen an apparition?