it to its living room tray, and snaps off the lights one by one as he winds his way through the house, back to his bed, where his wife, and the warmth of her skin, awaits him.
It is pitch-black in the bedroom, and silent once he cuts the fan’s spinning entirely, and then Roma sighs her heartbroken sigh when she’s dreaming about her grandmother Tatiana and her mother, Inessa. He waits until his strong and happy wife’s nocturnal sadness fades away, then carefully climbs into bed, fluffs his pillows, and closes his eyes.
Soon there is an internal rush of lapping oceanic waves pulling him under, into the ruffled layers of sleep, where he will travel to places he does not know, see people he never knew, and others he once loved, traveling, he thinks, on his own, believing, as he always has, that he alone inhabits his head. Mistaken in his assumption that the past no longer exists. Mistaken, too, in his certainty that the world can be understood, that he understands the world, or, at least, that he understands his own. As his breath grows even and deep, a sensed, rather than articulated, sentiment washes over him: I have been a very lucky man.
And that is true, absolutely true. But luck is a rescindable gift.
THE HOURS PASS, AND he sleeps deeply, and then all the blood-soaked history of the Judaic people, and all the history of those to whom he is related, whose lives were cut short or resulted in his existence, and all his beliefs about the past and the future, and about faith and prayer, are fading back into the pleats of Harry Tabor’s sleeping mind. It is dawn and he is waking, opening his shining brown eyes, running a large hand through his thick hair, still boisterously dark, threads of distinguished white only recently emerging, in this his seventieth year.
He is quick out of bed, the travertine marble cool under his feet, and in the bathroom, he gives his solid teeth a thorough cleaning, grinning at himself when he finishes rinsing. He picks up the razor, runs a hand over his cheeks, thinking happily of this afternoon, when his children and grandchildren will descend upon the family’s substantial and striking mid-century modernist homestead, with its five bedrooms and endless other rooms, all open to the expanse of sky and desert and weather and one or the other of their two pools. He and Roma and their progeny all gathered together for this weekend of Man of the Decade pomp and circumstance.
Maybe there will be time for a hike with his son. Wouldn’t Simon be surprised if he said, “I’m finally ready to do Cactus to Clouds”? Really, this would be the perfect weekend to hike that tough trail he has always avoided.
He sets down the razor. He’ll take the single-edge blade to his face tonight, be glisteningly smooth for the gala event celebrating him.
In his large closet, he dresses in his tennis whites, then tiptoes, socks and Tretorns in hand, out of the master bedroom with its view, when the drapes are pulled back, of the meditation pool, leaving Roma asleep, her face aglow in a shard of sunlight, dreaming, he hopes, about something pleasurable, not about Tatiana and Inessa, or the youngster she has begun treating who has ceased eating entirely.
In the sunny kitchen, the waft of espresso makes him smile again, that timer on the machine such a modern wonder. He throws back a first cup, rich and unadulterated, looking out over the large aquamarine rectangle in the main courtyard where Roma swims her daily laps before healing the children of the Coachella Valley.
Socks on, laces tied, he gulps down two more espressos, leaves the thimble-sized cup in the sink, and pulls from the freezer three bottles of water, slick as stalactites.
Out into the open-air carport, into his old convertible Mercedes coupe painted in a patina of gold, he revs the engine just a little, to feel the vroom in his being, and leaves his majestic home, which sits on a solid acre, driving past the flowering cacti and soaring palms, and the beds of mimosas, ocotillos, acacias, lemongrass, and the lilies of the Nile, after which the Tabors’ street is named, turning left onto his street, onto Agapanthus Lane. He presses the gas, feels the stalwart car gather its power, gliding so easily over the smooth macadam, a hop and a skip to the courts.
He could belong to any of the private tennis clubs in the area, and his tennis pal, Levitt, would prefer playing at his own, but Harry is a man of the people, and he prefers the public courts. After all, he comes from solid stock that knew how to make do with what they had, which was nothing. And he knows how to make do, too, only he has so much more than any impoverished Tabornikov could have imagined possessing back in the Pale of Settlement, when the world was so very, very, very old. Harry Tabor may no longer be chronologically young, but he feels as if he is, lives as if he is, as if this world is a great and wonderful place, and he himself is adding to that wondrousness, waking up every day strong as a bull, his thoughts sharp and important, his very being brand-new. A man self-made, through and through. That’s how he remembers his own life, up to this point.
And there is Levitt’s showy Maserati cooling down when Harry pulls into his regular spot at Ruth Hardy Park. Younger than Harry by a baker’s dozen, but not quite as agile a player, Levitt is a friend Harry considers “newish” since they met only a decade ago. In the desert, ten years is nothing against the antediluvian nature of the topography.
Creaky parking brake engaged, Henry swings himself easily through the car’s open door, is up on his feet, retrieving his tennis bag from the backseat.
“You ready to lose again, Levitt? I’m telling you, you’d better be tough, give me your prime-A game, because today is my lucky day.”
ROMA TABOR’S DREAMS ABOUT her baba Tatiana and her mother, Inessa, aren’t about what she has suffered and lost by their absence, or the bottomless sorrow that never dissolves; instead she dreams of their sufferings, their losses, their sorrows that they packed away after they found a way to escape.
For many years now, when she wakes, she thinks first about luck—about the terrible steps Tatiana had to take to find a shred of it in a world that decreed she should have none, and then about its constancy in her own life. From the time she was young, those strong women defied their experiences to teach her to trust in its tangible reality. She learned the lesson, but honors their before and after by remembering that believing one deserves luck doesn’t mean it won’t disappear in a flash.
This morning, there is Harry’s usual empty space next to her in the king-sized bed, and the sun’s heat on her face, and she thinks about luck, then puts it away, and waits to see what name is in her head. Today it is Noelani McCadden, a big name for a little girl who is only eight.
In the intake session on Monday, the mother, Jeanine, said, “One day my daughter was fine, the next day not. She’s an only child, and until a month ago, a couch potato. She didn’t like playing games during recess, wasn’t interested in taking gymnastics or ballet with her friends, or riding the bike we gave her for her birthday while her father and I took our regular after-dinner stroll. We tried to get her to go to camp this summer, where she would swim and learn how to trot on a horse, but she flat-out refused.
“Now, before dawn, she runs through our neighborhood, to the fire road, and keeps going. She’s eight. It’s not normal at that age to be running seven miles a day. And no matter what we do, we can’t stop her. If we try to stop her, she starts screaming, so we let her go, then follow at a distance in the car. Usually it’s Steve who does that, makes sure she’s safe.”
Roma pictured the little girl waking, dressing quickly, sneaking through the quiet house to the front door, carefully
