You Are My Heart and Other Stories Page 10

  She paused, but he said nothing.

  “For my part,” she continued, “I think I would have loved the child, and you would have too. It’s what I believed at the time, though I lacked the courage to say so—and I believed we might have been happy together. Who knows?”

  “Nobody.”

  Their drinks came, and she raised her glass. “To us,” she said.

  They drank, looked at their menus, ordered lunch—crab cakes for her, grilled seafood salad for him. They talked easily while they ate, telling each other about the years between, and about their apartments, their jobs, their children. He was in semiretirement, teaching one seminar a semester, but—the good news—would be permitted to remain in his faculty apartment on Claremont Avenue for the rest of his life; she had bought a two-bedroom co-op on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Ninth Street, and was working three days a week for Quinn and Janovsky, whose senior partners were men with whom she’d gone to law school. His son and daughter, both married, lived in Brooklyn, and each had two children. All three of her children—two girls and a boy—lived in and around Weston, Connecticut, near to where they had grown up.

  Few things in life made her happier than to know that her children were close, she said, and not just geographically. They actually liked one another, and this allowed her to believe that perhaps she had gotten a few things right in this life. When she said this, her eyes became moist, and she looked away quickly, remarking on how lovely the restaurant was—the arts-and-crafts style design, the soft amber lighting, and—rare thing in New York—the generous space between tables that allowed them to carry on a conversation without having to shout.

  He said that Henry’s had become a favorite. In fact, it had inspired him to think of working up a Zagat-style guide to the fifty quietest restaurants in New York City.

  “Ah,” she said, “but once you published the guide, things would change—”

  “You’ve just given me time for other projects. Thanks.”

  “Ever the helpmate,” she said. “But you do have more time now, don’t you, Paul? I mean—how be decorous?—I mean, since your wife died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she ill for a long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind my asking, given that—?”

  “There’s no need to be discreet—that’s what you meant, I think—not decorous—but I have no problem talking about Lorraine. She had an especially debilitating form of MS—her mind was alert to the end, though she did require a good deal of physical assistance the last few years, especially with her ADL’s.”

  “ADL’s?”

  “Activities of Daily Living.”

  “Like your brother then.”

  “Like my brother.”

  “Surely that thought—the parallel, which you could not have wished for—”

  “As you noted, the unconscious never sleeps,” he said.

  “Oh come on, Paul—no need to be snide. Surely it must have crossed your mind that here you were again, being the eternal caretaker…”

  “My brother had muscular dystrophy—Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, to be exact, not multiple sclerosis—and yes, the thought crossed my mind, as it did Lorraine’s. Taking care of Mort when I was a boy turned out to be excellent preparation for events of recent years. But how did you know?”

  “Know you’d made the connection about caring for your wife the way you’d cared for your brother?”

  “Know that I was a widower.”

  “Ah that !” she said, and smiled. “I read it in the alumni magazine. My husband, Roger, went to Columbia too, if you recall, and I saw an item in the ‘Class Notes—’ ” She paused, and when he said nothing, continued: “It’s how I’ve followed you through the years—your family, your career. You’ve become quite the literary critic. I loved your book on the Irish and the Jews, by the way, and—”

  “That was a scholarly book, not literary criticism, except in passing—more about immigration patterns and how—”

  “—our distinctive cultures influenced the different ways we adapted to our lives in the New World. Do I have it right?”

  “You really did read me then.”

  “My genteel way of stalking, I suppose,” she said. “But we used to talk about this stuff all the time. About how different our lives were, even though, as it turned out, we’d both been born and raised in Brooklyn, a few blocks from each other. Don’t you remember how we used to speculate on our commonalities and differences in the way you do in your book, only much more articulately than I ever could—”

  “Back then we were speculating in first draft,” he offered, “while in my book I was being articulate through nine years of revisions.”

  “Sometimes—” she said, and hesitated before going on “—sometimes I like to think that if you hadn’t known me, you would never have written the books you’ve written.”

  “Sounds about right,” he said.

  “So that, as you point out, the Irish, like my father, moved into politics, while the Jews, like…” She paused. “Sorry. I can’t find the right words, but what I’ve really been wanting to say, as I tried to do in my note, is that your gift for words used to intimidate me—to make me feel stupid somehow. Did you know that? I always felt—feared—you were about to correct me, and, therefore, of course, to have reason to reject me.”

  “But you rejected me.”

  “Only in the fact,” she said, “But where was I—? Oh yes—the Irish moved into politics, while the Jews, like—”

  “—like me?”

  “Like you, yes.”

  “While the Jews moved into matters more ethereal and intellectual?”

  “Yet you were merchants too.”

  “True, though when it came to my books, not very good merchants.”

  He looked around the restaurant and, recognizing several colleagues, wondered what they would think, seeing him here with an unfamiliar and attractive older woman. Your beauty used to intimidate me, he thought of saying, even though back then— could he tell her this now?—he had been disappointed to discover she was not upper class WASP, and not even lace curtain Irish like Grace Kelly, but working class Irish. He finished his drink, signalled to the waiter to bring two more.

  “To have read The Irish and the Jews Come to America,” he said, “is to make you one of a small but quite distinguished elite.”

  “Oh come on, Paul, you’re being—rare thing—falsely modest. You’ve produced an impressive body of work. Surely you’ve—”

  “No,” he said. “I’m being honest. People outside of academia have vastly inflated notions of our successes. Mostly, as I tell my grad students, we’re like caretakers in cemeteries, each of us tending to small plots of land—to the graves of one or two dead writers—pulling up weeds, repairing a headstone now and then, chasing away vandals—”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re correcting me again?” she asked. “But okay, your book on James—The Irish Henry James— surely that attracted an audience beyond academia.”

  “What did Roger do?”

  “Roger was an accountant—well, more than an accountant: he was Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of a paper manufacturing company. You changed the subject.”

  Their second Martinis arrived, and Paul raised his glass. “To us,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s the alcohol—despite my fabled heritage, I never could hold it well.” She grinned. “But okay, okay. I’m feeling fine—quite fine actually, though it saddens me to see you looking so gloomy. Moving right along then, let me be direct: Do you think we can be friends again?”

  “Why not?” he said. “The students these days have a category they call friends-with-benefits.”

  “Which means?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  She leaned back, a puzzled look on her face. Then her eyes went wide.

  “Really? ” she exclaimed.

  “They seem, at least in conversations with me, to have no diffic
ulties with it: with being friends with various people with whom they occasionally sleep. And yet—”

  “Forgive me,” she said, the back of her hand to her cheek, “but I think I’m blushing, and that this is what Craig, my eldest, would call ‘a generation thing.’ ”

  “I was just teasing,” he said.

  “No you weren’t.” She looked at him with large, watery eyes.

  “Have it your way. I wasn’t teasing. You are still a most attractive woman, Margaret. In fact, when you walked in before, I thought: God—she looks just like her mother did, and your mother was a real looker—movie star gorgeous like the aging stars of the thirties and forties we loved—Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Mary Astor—you look the way she did, especially now that you’ve let your hair go to white—”

  “Silver,” Margaret corrected. “Mother always insisted that her hair was neither gray nor white, but silver. Thank you for the compliment, I suppose—my Martinis and I thank you. What you see is real, by the way—no surgical enhancements. Mother is gone, of course. Yours?”

  “Gone.”

  “Mort?”

  “The same—many years ago, and you know what?” he said, unable to keep his voice from rising. “My mother was right when she bolted from the Muscular Dystrophy Association—from all that Jerry Lewis bleed-with-me stuff. Remember how she’d refuse to watch the telethons?”

  “I liked your mother. You get your passion from her—especially against injustice—and your eyes: those incredible graygreen-hazel-brown eyes that never stop changing. They’re extraordinary. Can we have another round of drinks, do you think?”

  “It’s been more than half a century, and billions of dollars wasted on research, and in the meantime, no help for the living, for the families that have to cope day by day, and—”

  “Care not cure,” you used to preach. “I remember you talking about writing a book with that title.”

  “Did I?”

  He motioned to the waiter to take away their plates.

  “I’ll have coffee,” Margaret said to the waiter. Then, to Paul: “Forget the drink, but we do have time for coffee, yes?”

  “Oh yes. Lots of time. Being a professor, as Saul Bellow used to say, is a racket.”

  “Thinking about Mort upset you. I’m sorry. I forgot how close you two were.”

  “Did you?” Paul asked. He waited, but Margaret stared at him without expression. “He was twenty-nine when he died, and, unlike his brother, without a bitter bone in his body.” He forced a smile. “Sorry I got so edgy, but being with you again, well—the memories do find their way home.”

  “That’s a good thing, Paul.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—remember what you taught me, from Cather—Willa Cather—that sometimes memories are—how did it go?—that sometimes memories are better than anything that can ever happen to us again?” She shook her head sideways. “Amazing that she thought that way—and she wasn’t even Irish.”

  “After you and I split, my mother started an organization to help children with muscular dystrophy—take them to ballgames, movies, museums, parks—I drove the van during the summers, and we’d have raffles and Bingo nights to raise money for the outings, and to help families with—”

  “—their ADL’s?”

  “—with their ADL’s,” he said. “Yes. Thank you. But the organization died when she did.”

  Margaret started to giggle, covered her mouth. “I got the answer right, didn’t I?” she said.

  “The answer?”

  “To my question.”

  “I don’t understand,” Paul said. “You’re being too obscure—or too clever—for me, but what I was thinking—what I was about to say—was that I used to want to kill Mort, did I ever tell you that?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “All the parents—the mothers especially—always saying how wonderful their children were, how much they loved them, how blessed they were, when these kids made their lives into living hells. In our hearts, we were all murderers. You ever have to clean up a two hundred fifty pound sack of a disabled man with a bad case of diarrhea?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet? But—” He shook his head sideways, as if to clear it of extraneous matter. “But tell me this,” he said. “Besides the work you do with the law firm, and keeping tabs on old flames—what, as people put it these days, what are some of the—awful phrase—fun things you do?”

  “Ah,” she said. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Really. I’m surprised talking about Mort got to me the way it did.”

  “I’m not,” she said, “but here’s the deal, since you ask. I’ve been on several of their cruises—the ones the alumni association sponsors. I’ve been to the Galapagos Islands, and on a trip that went from Patagonia to South Africa.”

  “I get the brochures,” he said.

  “Have you ever considered going on one?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I tried some of the more exclusive dating services first, and some online sites, and discovered what most women of a certain age discover,” she said. “And then a friend of mine from Weston, also a widow, met a man on a cruise—she said she figured out that on a cruise you had a better than average shot at meeting a man of a certain age who was well-educated, had money and a curious mind, and, if alone on a cruise, would be in search of a companion.”

  “So why,” he asked, “are you telling me all this?”

  “You’re teasing again, right?”

  “What I think,” he said, “is that you were right before—that some things are better now because, as you put it, young people have—dread word—more options. But what we had in our years, I’ve always thought, was something they don’t have now—the sense that anything was possible, whether in matters political or personal.”

  She folded her napkin, placed it on the table. “Did you really always think that?” she asked.

  “Now look—”

  “I had this idea for a cartoon a while back, where you see people hustling toward two lines in which men and women are seated at tables across from one another, and above one set of tables there’s a sign that says, ‘Speed Dating,’ and above the other set it says, ‘Speed Eating.’ ”

  “That’s funny,” Paul said. “That’s actually very funny.”

  “I waited seven months after your wife’s passing, but it seems that you are, to put a kind spin on things, going to be sitting shiva for a very long time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You have no intention of ever calling me or seeing me again, do you?”

  “I don’t understand why you have to—”

  “Can you answer the question, please?”

  Paul shrugged, but said nothing.

  “You knew that when you responded to my note and agreed to meet with me, didn’t you?” Margaret stood, steadied herself against the back of her chair with one hand. “I believe our accounts are even. Still, I’ve decided to let you pay the check today.”

  She moved to his side of the table, bent down, and, holding to his tie with a firm downward grip, whispered in his ear: “Isn’t it amazing what the imagination can do to us? Given your line of work, you should be the expert on that, but really—don’t you think it’s amazing to realize, after all these years, that I’m not the woman you imagined I was once upon a time, or, for sure, the woman you imagine I am now?”

  She kissed him on the cheek, then bit down on his ear lobe. “I had a swell time,” she said, and before he could respond, and while he touched his ear with his napkin, hoping, he realized, he might find pinpricks of blood on it, she turned and walked from the restaurant.

  Summer Afternoon

  Allan Blum and his wife Esther, vacationing in the South of France for the month of December with their friend Sam Gewirtz—in Spéracèdes, Aa village near Grasse, in the Maritime Alps—stood on the road that led from the church to the c
emetery, waiting for the funeral cortege. Two helicopters hovered in the air above them. Behind metal barricades, crowds three and four deep lined both sides of the road, and policemen, in pairs and on horseback, were stationed along the route. Church bells had been ringing steadily.

  The sky was dark, without sun or the imminence of sun. The temperature was near freezing—the radio had predicted thunderstorms—and on terraces that rose toward Cabris, a village perché a mile or so above Spéracèdes, the undersides of leaves on olive trees appeared in the light breeze to have been brushed with silver.

  Late afternoon the day before, on their way back from Nice, where they had had a leisurely lunch and toured the old Russian and Jewish parts of the city, they had been stopped at four separate police check points. They were asked to get out of their car, had their passports and driver’s licenses examined, and had been questioned rigorously: What was their purpose in being in France? Why had they rented a house in Spéracèdes, and how long did they intend to stay there? Were they acquainted with the Algerian woman who was accused of murdering the village doctor’s wife and child, or with other Algerians who lived or worked in Spéracèdes? Did they employ any Algerians to do housekeeping or gardening… ?

  Allan and Sam, both in their late sixties, lived near each other on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and had gone through elementary school, high school, and college together. Five months earlier, Sam had lost his wife Pauline to breast cancer, and when six weeks after this, at the time of the Jewish New Year, Allan suggested Sam join him and Esther for their vacation in France, Sam had agreed at once.

  Sam pointed to the far side of the road—to the Hotel Soleillade, where police sharpshooters, in flak jackets, were positioned on the roof and in some of the upper-story windows. “When I lived in Paris for a while, and this was a long, long time ago, before Pauline and I were married,” he said, “I remember looking out my window—I had a second-floor apartment on the Boulevard Raspail—and seeing a funeral come by—a large black hearse, and mourners in top hats, and a brass band playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”