Secrets of Happiness

by Joan Silber

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Ethan, a young lawyer in New York, learns that his father has long kept a second family - a wife and two kids living in Queens. In the aftermath of this revelation, Ethan's mother spends a year travelling abroad, returning much changed, just as her now ex-husband falls ill. Across town, Ethan's half brothers are caught in their own complicated journeys: one brother's penchant for minor delinquency has escalated and the other must travel to Bangkok to bail him out, while the bargains their mother struck about love and money continue to shape all their lives.
As Ethan finds himself caught in a love triangle of his own, the interwoven fates of these two households elegantly unfurl to touch many other figures, revealing secret currents of empathy and loyalty, the bounty of improvised families and the paradoxical ties that weave through life's rich contours. With a generous and humane spirit, Secrets of Happiness elucidates the ways people marshal the resources at hand in an effort to find joy.
One of O: The Oprah Magazine's O Mag's Most Anticipated Books of 2021
One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 picks for Spring 2021

Release date: May 4, 2021

Publisher: Counterpoint

Print pages: 288

Sample

4/Rachel

 

My brother’s longtime boyfriend decided to leave him, once and for all. Enough, he said, was enough. If you can’t stop arguing after twenty years, when will you ever? Time for a new start for both of them. They would always be friends, of course. He would always care about Saul, but he did not think that waking up every day in the same apartment was good for either of them.

This speech might have made sense except that my brother had just been diagnosed with some stage or other of leukemia. (Lymphocytic leukemia, and it was hard to get a full story out of Saul.) And the apartment, in the upper reaches of Manhattan, belonged to Kirk, the boyfriend. My brother, a fifty-seven-year-old librarian with no personal savings, was going to have to find a new place to live. For however long he planned to do that.

I was stunned and outraged by the news, maybe more than my brother was. Why had I ever liked Kirk? I had, I always had. With his deep voice, his good haircuts, his quiet merciless jokes. He called me Sister Susie (my name is Rachel, the name was his kidding). Sister Susie was a perky lass, always getting into the gin on the sly. We had a whole set of stories about her and her unusual relations with her dog Spot. Some of his friends thought I was really called Susie.

How could you decide to break up with someone who had a mortal illness? Who could do such a thing? Kirk could.

 

“The man is a fuck-head,” I said to Saul. “And he has no honor.”

“We never got along that well,” Saul said. “Remember when he picked a fight with me in front of the entire Brooklyn Library staff? He was always a pain. And you know how full of himself he’s been. He thinks being a digital art director is like being Michelangelo—I always laughed at the way he used the word creative. Don’t make a big deal out of this. It’s not the end of the world.”

 

What is, then? I thought, but I didn’t say it.

Kirk had not given him any particular deadline for moving out, and everyone in New York knew couples who stayed together for years after breaking up, while prices rose and good deals slipped away. Meanwhile Kirk and my brother were sharing the same bed every night and were—I gleaned from my brother’s remarks—still having what could be called sexual contact. I didn’t blame Saul for mentioning it either, showing off a last bit of swagger.

And maybe the breakup was just an idea, a flash-in-the pan theory. Maybe Kirk didn’t mean it.

“He says I’m lazy about being sick,” Saul said. “I should do more, be proactive. Has anyone used that word since 1997?”

“What is it with him?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“He’s seeing someone new,” Saul said.

“He’s what?” I said. I had to stop wailing in protest, because it was useless and only increased my brother’s suffering. He had his ties to Kirk; he didn’t want to hear what I had to say. No big deal was his mantra, and there was probably a way to say it in Sanskrit or Pali. “It’s someone named Ethan,” Saul said. “A lawyer.” Did I want to know his name? I did not.

I was his big sister, two years older, but we were both old now. I was the one with the more chaotic sexual history—I’d been with a long list of men and lived with some very poor choices—but time had passed since those days. The daughter of one of my boyfriends (I was never into marriage) still lived with me, after losing patience with both her parents, and she was already twenty-three. I loved Nadia, I was glad to have her with me, but my apartment wasn’t really one that could fit her and me and my brother too. An old bargain of a place in Hell’s Kitchen. Not that Saul had expressed any interest in moving in.

Was he looking at apartments? Not at the moment. At the moment he was busy going to a clinic where they inserted a needle into a port in his arm and dripped chemicals into his veins. I went with him for this—it was not an adorable procedure—and it took a while. Nadia went to pick him up once. And Kirk went the rest of the time. He did.

Saul would go home to sleep after the procedures— who wouldn’t?—and he’d lie around with headphones on watching Netflix for hours when sleep evaded him. The library was giving him time off with no trouble, and maybe he was never going back. He hadn’t shown any improvement after the first round of chemo, and the doctors wanted to start something else. He was still losing weight; his nose looked bigger, outgrowing his face. It hurt my heart to look at him. “He could try to eat,” Kirk said. “He doesn’t even try. I buy things he likes, that he always liked. You know he likes those pecan crunch things. It doesn’t matter.”

I had my own life, of course, my own work, my own loyalties. I had a decent-enough job in human resources for a hotel chain, overseeing stingy policies and crazy rate changes. I was the old girl who’d been there forever and knew the ropes. Nadia liked to ask if I could game the system—get billions paid out in insurance for someone who was healthy—but I had to tell her that was beyond me. Nadia had a youthful attitude about the possibilities of cheating. Anyway, one night I was buying us supper at her favorite Mexican place in the West Village when I heard someone at a nearby table say, “Just be patient. Okay?”

I knew the voice; it was Kirk’s. He was talking to a nice-looking dude in his forties, arguing in that weary, reasonable way of his. I knew that tone. It must be his new lover, this not-so-happy guy in a dark suit.

“I’ve been waiting a while,” the guy said.

Oh, were they waiting for my brother to die? Or just to disappear, to crawl offstage? I was choking with fury. Did I want to rush over and make a scene? Did I want to stay where I was to hear more?

“Hey!” Nadia said, solving the problem for me. “There’s Kirk! Hey, Kirk!”

He took in the sight of us, waved. What a fuck-head.

“Look at you,” he called out to Nadia, across two tables in between. “You’re looking great. Hi, Rachel. This is my friend, Ethan.”

 

We all nodded at one another. Even Nadia was taking things in.

“Why does everybody all of a sudden know about this restaurant?” she said. “I hate the way it is now, all these people.”

“Everybody knows everything nowadays,” Kirk said.

“Not for the better either,” I said.

“We had a very nice meal,” Kirk said. “Didn’t you think so, Ethan? We’re almost done. Don’t mind us. Enjoy your drinks.”

And then he turned away from us and murmured something to Ethan. He could go ahead and pretend they were in another room; he could do what he wanted.

“They’ll leave soon,” I said to Nadia. Not that softly either.

Around us a speaker was playing, “Besame, besame mucho.” The singer was pleading in long notes. We stood our ground; we chewed and drank. Nadia said, “I can’t believe he had to bring him here.” I didn’t know they had left until, halfway through my second bottle of Dos Equis, I looked across and spotted other diners at that table.

“He thinks he’s so slick,” she said. “Mr. Not-Embarrassed.”

“He’s like Woody Allen—the heart wants what it wants. Remember when he said that when he ran off with his stepdaughter?” Nadia had probably not even been born then, but she’d heard about it. “People think if they’re honest about their cravings, it makes anything okay,” I said. “That’s a fallacy of modern life.”

I found out Nadia was doing what sounded like praying for my brother. She hadn’t been raised in any religion (not with those parents), but she was a great reader online, she taught herself things. In the middle of the night I was in the hallway on my way to pee, when I heard her voice in the living room. “May Saul be better,” I heard. “May he be well and happy. May he live with ease. May he live longer.”

And Who did she think was processing this request? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to smudge the purity of whatever she was doing. I listened for her again as I walked down that hallway the night after, but no words vibrated in the air. The next morning, when I got up early, I saw that she slept (as always) flat on her back on the folded-out sofa, and the statue of the Buddha had been moved to a shelf in her line of sight. It was Saul’s Buddha—that is, he had brought it to me after a trip somewhere. Thailand? Cambodia? It was a gray stone figure, the size of a gallon of milk, sitting with one hand raised with a flat palm. Fear not, that hand gesture meant. Saul had been a fan of Buddhism—he read books, he went to meditation classes, he explained very well how ego-craving was the source of all suffering—but his interest had faded in the last few years. He hadn’t said anything about leaning on it now. But Nadia was?

 

“You don’t have to follow all the rules,” she said, when I asked. “People get so caught up in that. As if somebody twenty-five hundred years ago was the last one to know anything about spiritual matters. How could that be right?” What I’d heard as prayer were phrases from a Buddhist practice, but she had added flourishes, like setting out a green ribbon (I hadn’t noticed) because Saul’s favorite color was green.

At least she wasn’t kneeling. When I was a child, my mother caught me kneeling by my bed, intoning, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” (How did I even know that prayer?)

“Jews don’t kneel,” my mother said.

I got up right away. I sort of loved the urgency in my mother’s voice. She spoke rarely about religious matters and sometimes made fun of what I learned in Hebrew School. This was serious. I wanted serious; that was why I was praying.

Like Nadia. All over the world (I traveled much in my wayward youth), people go in for petitionary prayer; they ask for concrete and specific things, even when they’re not supposed to, according to their systems of belief. They set out flowers, fruit, candles, money. Tiny models of body parts they want fixed. Votive wishes on papers they pin on trees.

I looked at the green ribbon, a strip of satin left over from a Christmas package. Did she think a higher power could bring about what she wanted? “You never know,” she said.

“Can’t argue with that,” I said, though I could have.

• • •

Nadia was nine when I first met her. I was dating Nick, her dad, and he had her on weekends. She kept calling me by the wrong name on purpose—Rochelle, Raybelle, Michelle—and looking at me with fiendish eyes. But she got over all that, eventually, and then she was nuzzling and cuddling like a much younger kid and saying she liked my house. She pocketed a spoon when she left. (I saw, who cared?) I admired her resourcefulness, her range of attempts to be on top of the situation. She was working hard to watch out for herself. When her father later referred to her as a total pill—he liked that phrase—I said, “What kind of crap is that?”

Now it was Saul’s turn to be a total pill. He talked too much about his different kinds of chemo; he talked too much about his white blood cells. Once he had been happy to argue about how detective novels were good for the brains of middle school kids and why online reading was a triumph against capitalism. Now he was like any patient, caught up in the drama of his own ordeals, his schedule of medications, the textures of his shrinking world. I wanted him to be better than that.

 

“Sister Susie says you should have a joint,” I said. “Your treatments are over. You can do what you want.” I lit up while I was spreading this doctrine.

“What do I fucking want?” he said. But he took a hit. “There’s nothing I want.”

“Isn’t that an ideal state in Buddhism?” I said.

“That’s a gross simplification,” Saul said. But he looked at least a little pleased. It was better news than he’d heard for a while.

“Did you know Nadia’s been chanting on your behalf?”

“She told me,” he said. “What a good girl she turned into.”

He really wanted nothing? He had to want to live, if he was going to last a little longer. Indifference would drag him under. What did nothing mean? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention properly