about anything: their own private troubles or an idea they’d just had about something—God or baseball or politics or science—or a funny thing, or something terrible, that had happened to them (a long time ago or yesterday or a “just this minute, just before I came in here today”). And they would always say, after a while, “So what do you think? What do you make of that?”
Until she had left home, she’d never noticed how much of her time, her life, was spent in conversation. She would never have imagined that she might look back someday and marvel over it, or think with longing (think at all!) about the people in her neighborhood who dropped in at her parents’ store each day. Certainly she’d never thought of them—the “regulars”—as friends. She had known them her whole life: she’d been working in the store in exchange for her allowance since she’d started seventh grade—and before that, all through grade school, she’d sat at the counter doing homework every afternoon, nursing an egg cream or a cherry lime rickey for hours, eavesdropping on the teenagers who gathered there and hoping one of them would speak to her. The teenagers—fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds!—she had spied on and admired so much had grown up and with hardly an exception stayed around the neighborhood (some had gotten married right away and moved into their own apartments, some had gone to Brooklyn College, and some had commuted up to Hunter or to City; two or three had left for upstate colleges and then returned once they had graduated) and then joined the ranks of “regulars,” chatting for a while with Esther after she had counted out their change. There was almost no one who came in whom Esther didn’t know, by sight if not by name, and yet if she had been asked, back then, about someone who’d come into the store, she would have said, “He’s just somebody from the neighborhood.”
But all of those somebodies from the neighborhood, all those familiar almost-strangers, had talked to her. No one talked to her now, not that way. Not that way, and not the way the girl whose name had been something like Alice had talked to her or the way Ramon had talked to her. Who would ever talk to her that way, in any of those ways, again?
She had not expected—had not even hoped, she told herself—that she would ever find friends like Kathleen and Leah again, that she would ever talk to anyone as she had talked to them, with them, since the second grade or even earlier. She’d known them both since the year they were born. She could not remember when they had begun to talk so earnestly and urgently to one another for hours every day. They talked on the way to school, at lunch, on the way home, and on warm nights on Kathleen’s stoop until her mother sent them home and told Kathleen to go to bed. On cold or rainy nights they took turns talking on the phone—Esther called Kathleen, Kathleen called Leah, and Leah called Esther.
But that had changed, Esther had to remind herself, before she had left home. She still didn’t know if she had started making up excuses to avoid them out of fear she’d give away her secret if they talked, or if she had begun avoiding them because they hadn’t guessed she had a secret from them and guessed what the secret was—or if they had been avoiding her because she had become so secretive and strange (what was the point of talking to her anymore, they might have thought, when everything she said was dull and cautious?).
At first she hadn’t even missed talking to them. Their conversations had changed so much that there was nothing much to miss. Besides, she’d had Bartha to talk to then—though that was a different kind of talking, she saw now. She hadn’t noticed at the time, during their early days together, that it wasn’t really conversation they were having. He had told her stories, and she’d listened—she had loved to listen to his stories, and she’d heard some of them so many times she had learned them by heart, down to the particulars of dialogue. But it had been a long time now since he had told her any stories—it had been a long time since they’d talked at all beyond the pleasantries they exchanged without fail each day. Good morning, they said, and How did you sleep? And later on, Good evening. How was your day? And, at last, Good night, sleep well. He might, at dinner, speak of something he had read in that day’s newspaper or mention a new student—he had started giving lessons again—or she might tell him something Alexander had done in his absence (managed to roll over, closed his hand around a rattle, uttered a new sound). As for talk, real talk, about ideas or feelings, there was none, not ever. Not with Bartha, not with anyone.
There had been a few occasions when she had tried, early on, to talk to Vilmos. But he’d looked at her as if she had just spoken in another language—a third language, neither his own nor the second one he’d learned as an adult. He looked so bewildered it seemed hard-hearted of her to persevere, and so she did not. But she still wondered over it, wondered sometimes if Vilmos and Clara talked when they were by themselves—if Vilmos simply couldn’t talk to her, or if conversation, any conversation, seemed to him to be conducted in that other language he had never thought to learn.
With Clara, of course, Esther couldn’t talk at all. How could you talk to someone who disliked you so? How wrong Bartha had been about her! Imagine them as friends! And yet still, sometimes, Esther would find herself thinking that if only Clara had not been determined to dislike her from the start, they might have become friendly if not truly friends. They might have shopped together, taken walks around the neighborhood or sat down for a Coke together, chatted—chatted, at least, even if they couldn’t really talk—even if Clara would never understand her in the way that Leah and Kathleen had (in the way Esther had thought they had, she reminded herself). And maybe that would have been better than the nothing she had now.
There were limits to understanding, anyway, as she had already learned. If Leah and Kathleen hadn’t understood her—hadn’t known her, really, even with all of that talk between them—who would? Perhaps she was better off not talking, for this way she wouldn’t, couldn’t, be fooled into thinking she was understood. Perhaps she would never talk again! Perhaps she’d take a vow of silence.
It dawned on her then that she was getting drunk. It wasn’t altogether a familiar feeling, although she had been drunk four times that she could name. Bartha had introduced her to wine shortly after they had become lovers (often, right after her lesson, they would drink some wine together before opening the velvet couch that folded out into a bed) and while he was careful not to let her drink too much, he didn’t seem to know how little it took for her to get drunk.
She noticed that her glass was full—Vilmos must have refilled it—and now she saw the second bottle on the table. The waitress had already come and gone without her noticing. Vilmos had raised his glass again. “Just one more toast,” he said. “The most important one. To Esther and János—to their marriage, to their love.”
She picked up her glass and drained it quickly. Then she waited for Bartha to scold her. It was time for him to tell her that she’d had enough to drink, that it wasn’t good either for her or for the baby for her to drink too much wine.
But he didn’t say anything, and as she watched him for a moment, sipping his own wine and keeping silent, she saw that he wasn’t going to. That he could surprise her was itself surprising. It was disagreeable—and yet didn’t it confirm what she had just been thinking? That no one knew anyone, that we fooled ourselves into thinking we were truly known, fooled ourselves into thinking we truly knew others, even the people we loved. This was a reminder that one must be vigilant. It was too easy to be fooled.
It was too easy to be fooled in ways both large and small.
“More wine?” Vilmos said. He refilled her glass before she had a chance to answer. “One last toast. Just one, all right?” He spilled a little wine as he lifted his glass this time, and Esther realized that he must be getting drunk too—none of them had eaten yet today. “Let us drink to passion,” he said. “To true, beautiful, life-altering, great passion.”
Esther took a sip of wine. To passion. She peeked at Bartha, whose expression hadn’t changed. Vilmos was definitely drunk. But drunk or not, this must be how he
