Book Club: Read Love and Treasure

Read an extract from the prologue of Ayelet Waldman‘s Love and Treasure - our Book Club choice this week.

Prologue
MAINE
2013

Jack Wiseman, immersed as ever in the pages of a book, did not notice the arrival of the bus until alerted by the stir among the other people waiting in the overheated station lounge. The pugnacious chin he aimed at the coach’s windows had a bit of Kleenex clinging to it, printed with a comma of blood, and his starched and ironed shirt gaped at the collar, revealing pleats in the drapery of his neck and a thick white thatch of fur on his chest. He squinted, caught a glimpse of the glory of his grand- daughter’s hair, and pulled himself to his feet. He tore a corner from the back page of somebody’s discarded Ellsworth American and tucked it between the pages of his old Loeb edition of Herodotus, measuring with a rueful snort the remaining unread inches. He had never been a man to leave a job unfinished, a fact on which he supposed he must have been relying, perhaps unconsciously, in undertaking to reread, for what must be the eighth or ninth time, this most garrulous of classical historians.

As the bus disgorged its first passengers, Jack got momentarily lost in contemplation of the disembarking soldiers, home on leave from the very ancient battlefields as in the book he was reading, from Babylon and Bactria, their camouflage fatigues the colour of ashes and dust, the pattern jagged, like the pixels of a computer screen. Then Natalie’s hair kindled in the bus’s doorway, and he held up the little green-backed volume to catch her attention. He could tell from the look of shock that crossed her face in the instant before she smiled that pancreatic cancer had taken even worse a toll on him than he’d imagined. Her lips moved.

He lifted a finger, motioning her to wait. He pressed a button on his hearing aid and said, ‘Sweetheart! You made it.’

…she had likely come to Maine as much to flee her own troubles as to lose herself in the alleviation of his.

‘Hey, Grandpa.’ Her eyes were bleary, the red dent in her cheek from whatever she had been leaning against reminding him of how she used to look as a child, waking from an afternoon nap. Or perhaps it was her mother he was remembering, an image coming from farther away and longer ago. He took note of her pallor, the bruised look of the skin under her green eyes, and thought that she had likely come to Maine as much to flee her own troubles as to lose herself in the alleviation of his. Indeed the possibility of her finding consolation in worry over him was one of the reasons, not that you needed a reason to want to see your only granddaughter, he had agreed so quickly when she first called to say that she wanted to make the trip.

‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘There’s not much in Bangor, but if you can wait, the Grill’s open. I could take you there.’

‘You could take me? You drove?’ she said.

He just blinked at her, tempted to employ one of her own favourite childhood expressions: Duh. He had been expecting this line of inquiry.

‘How else would I pick you up?’ he said.

‘I figured you’d call a taxi!’

‘Dave had a fare. Round trip to Portland. I couldn’t very well ask him to turn it down, not in the off-season. Business is slow.’

‘Oh, is it?’ She shook her head with disapproval that was affectionate but sincere. ‘So this isn’t about you being stubborn and proud?’

‘They make a great pumpkin pie at the Grill,’ he said. ‘How’s that sound?’

She reached for his chin, and with a mixture of tenderness and reproof picked the bit of Kleenex from his shaving cut.

‘Why didn’t you call a Bangor cab?’ she said, having inherited the full genetic complement of Wiseman stubbornness, if not pride.

‘A Bangor cab!’ he said, sincerely horrified by the notion.

‘Those guys only take Route One! We’d be stuck in mill traffic for hours, this time of day.’

By now they had reached the car, a Volvo DL wagon that for twenty-three years, in the summertime, over breaks and sabbaticals, had ferried first Jack and his wife, then Jack alone, from New York City to Maine and back again. He wondered if it was worth leaving the blue behemoth to Natalie. Like all his possessions, like everything that chance or fate had ever entrusted to his care, he had kept the car in impeccable order. Properly maintained, it might run for years to come. But Natalie might not care to pay the steep New York parking fees. She might, once he was gone, never again care to make the long drive to Red Hook, Maine. And though she was, and would always be, his tzatzkeleh, his little treasure, his love for her was as free of illusion as it was of reservation. There was little evidence in the way that she had recently conducted her life to suggest that she knew how to maintain anything at all.

‘Do you think you’ll want the car?’ he said as he opened the driver’s-side door for her. He walked around, opened his own door, got in, and handed her the key. ‘Or should I put an ad in the paper?’

‘Don’t sell it right now. We’ll need it while I’m up here. Unless you’re planning on coming down to New York?’

‘There are hospices here, same as there. Except here I’m in my own home, and in New York I’d be forced into some misbegotten nursing home. Thanks to the grateful generosity of Columbia University.’

‘Grandpa, you weren’t really living in that apartment. You were there like, what? Three months a year?’

‘More like four.’

‘They have so many full-time faculty members to house. You can’t blame them . . .’

‘Forty-six years, Natalie. It wouldn’t have killed them to make it forty-six and a half.’

She started the engine and then let it idle, warming it up the way his regimen required. They sat listening to the engine in the chill of the car’s interior, giving him ample time to regret his bitter words.

Having faced or lived through some of the choicest calamities, both personal and world historical, that the twentieth century had to offer, Jack Wiseman had rarely given way to bitterness until now. He supposed it must be a symptom of the disease that was killing him.

‘You could stay with me,’ Natalie said at last. ‘There’s plenty of room now that Daniel’s moved out.’

She sounded exasperated, with his question, with herself, maybe just with having to tell the story again.

‘I’m here,’ Jack said. ‘And you’re here now, too.’

‘Yes.’

‘Might I ask how long you plan to stay?’

‘As long as you need me.’

‘It shouldn’t be too long.’

‘Grandpa.’

‘Anyway. Good of the firm to let you go.’

‘I had vacation saved up.’ She put the car into reverse with a show, again for his benefit, of checking the rearview and both side mirrors. Then she sighed and put the car back into park.

‘Actually, that’s not true.’

‘What’s not true?’

‘I’m not taking my vacation time. I quit.’

‘You quit?’ He thumped his hand on the dashboard. ‘To take care of me? That’s absolutely unacceptable, Natalie. I won’t allow it.’

‘It wasn’t because of you. They would have given me leave.’ She eased out into the street, speeding up slowly so as not to risk a skid on the icy road or, more likely, his reprimand for taking it too fast.

‘Why then?’ he said.

‘Why.’ She sounded exasperated, with his question, with herself, maybe just with having to tell the story again. ‘Well, I was in a co-worker’s office, and she was responding to a set of interrogatories. Those are, like, questions from opposing counsel in a lawsuit.’

He waited.

‘They were from Daniel’s firm.’

‘He wrote the questions?’

‘No. He’s in the corporate department. This was a litigation document.’

‘And?’ He noticed that she had put her indicator on. ‘Not Route One,’ he said sharply. ‘Keep going until you hit Forty-Six.’

‘Okay.’

‘Seeing a document from Daniel’s firm made you quit your job?’ he asked, wondering if his brain was slowing, if there was some obvious connection here that anyone but a dying old fool could see.

‘It made me realise how entangled our lives are. He could end up at my office for a closing. Or I could end up at his for a settlement conference. I just don’t want that to happen.’

‘You quit a job making twice as much money as I made in my last year as a tenured professor because you were afraid you might bump into your ex-husband in a conference room?’

‘It sounds ridiculous.’

‘It is ridiculous.’

‘I just want a fresh start.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about this any more. Is that okay?’

He nodded. Not talking about things was always, in the view of Jack Wiseman, a viable if not preferable option. In this case, in particular, because all that he could think of that he wanted to say to his granddaughter boiled down, in the end, to: What the hell happened to you? She had always been so sensible, resilient, purposeful, even single-minded. But ever since her divorce – no, from the moment she had unaccountably decided on her hasty and ill-advised marriage to Daniel Friedman – the kid had been a fucking mess.

‘Turn right at the blinking yellow,’ he said, but her turn signal was already on. In this regard, at least, she still knew her way.

Taken from Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman