You Are My Heart and Other Stories Read online

  Doctor Chehade, whose voice had a mellow, liquid quality that Ira found beguiling, reached below the gurney, unlocked the brake, and, holding an IV pole with one hand, pushed Ira along the corridor.

  “I was able to obtain a private room for you, which is one reason for the delay,” he said. “But also, I wanted to talk with you of something existent on a more personal note.”

  In the hospital room, Doctor Chehade offered Ira his hand, and when Ira stood in the space between bed and gurney, he felt his knees give way.

  “I’m weak,” he said. “The journey from the gurney, right?”

  Doctor Chehade laughed. “I agree with Doctor Guérard—the fact that your sense of humor has not departed is an excellent indicator of regeneration. But you have not eaten for many hours, and so I have ordered a special dinner for you. I think you will be pleased.”

  “Thanks.” Ira sat on the bed. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “It has been my pleasure, for a man of your eminence and generosity.” Doctor Chehade smiled. “I took the liberty of searching for you on the internet, you see, and I state now that the honorable charitable work you have done in your own country, and in Indonesia during the tsunami, serves as a reminder to me to consider seriously the filing of an application to be of service to Médecins Sans Frontières, an organization that at this time benefits only from my modest financial support. And you are also a man of Jewish descent, am I correct?”

  “Yes. But why—?”

  “My parents were friendly with a Jewish man—Austrian, not Israeli—when I was a young boy in Beirut. He was a merchant involved in silk and linens, and we ate in his home upon occasion. I am Christian—not Muslim or Druse—and thus did not have restrictions against eating pork, but neither did this man and his family. His name was Emanuel Mandelbaum, and he loved electrical appliances and had acquired many—vegetable choppers, small ovens, grillades, egg boilers. In his basement, he repaired appliances for friends and neighbors. He was a fastidious man, and, remembering now the deftness of his fingers—they were quite small, and what I think you call ‘stubbed’—it occurs to me that he would have made an excellent surgeon.”

  “Was he a survivor?”

  “A survivor?”

  “Of the camps.”

  “Of course.”

  Doctor Chehade reached into an inside jacket pocket and, like a magician, so deft were his moves, he withdrew a piece of equipment which he quickly attached to his forehead. It was a head lamp, Ira saw, and it gave off a long rod-like beam of pure white light. Doctor Chehade directed the beam of light onto the palm of his left hand so that he could adjust its intensity. Then he removed the bandage from Ira’s damaged eye, after which, very gently, he probed the area surrounding the eye with his fingers.

  “Very good,” he said. “Excellent.”

  He turned out the room’s overhead light, closed the door. In his left hand he held a small piece of glass, which he moved back and forth in the space between Ira’s eye and the light that came from the head lamp.

  “No more split-lens ophthalmoscopes?” Ira asked.

  “We have not used those for many years,” Doctor Chehade replied. “This is a convex lens, you see, and creates a virtual image, but an image that is indefinitely more accurate.”

  “You mean infinitely—infinitely more accurate.”

  “Of course.”

  The lens, which Doctor Chehade rotated between thumb and forefinger, looked to Ira like a large cat’s eye. Ira closed his good eye, and when he did, saw nothing but gray, as if a sheet of slate had been slipped into a slot behind his retina in the way a photographer slipped a photographic plate into a camera.

  Doctor Chehade was replacing the bandage, washing his hands. “It is as I thought,” he said. “The healing has already begun, but we will not know for some time yet how much regeneration we will have. You may dispense with the bandage tomorrow, nor will you require an eye patch afterward. I have ordered antibiotic drops, to prevent infection and inflammation, and I am confident that you will regain, at the least, some portion of your peripheral vision.”

  “And after that—?”

  Doctor Chehade shrugged. “Who knows? Time, Doctor Farb. Time must become our friend. In four to six weeks, we will know more. But I would look forward, frankly, to a healing period of at least several months.”

  “Great,” Ira said. “And I had a heart attack too, right?”

  “A minor infarction we discovered while preparing you for surgery, one which is, as we say truly, of little or no consequence. Doctor Guérard estimates that it probably occurred some time within the past twelve months. Perhaps you recall some unusual indigestion, or some fleeting pain you attributed to exercise, or—”

  “S.B.D.,” Ira said.

  “S.B.D.?”

  “Silent But Deadly—what we called silent flatulence when I was a boy.”

  “That is very good—I will remember it,” Doctor Chehade said. “S.B.D. But Doctor Guérard is not concerned for your heart, for it is a kind of miracle—what we call the wisdom of the body, yes?—how one can function and live on with only minor portions of the heart muscle remaining alive. Doctor Guérard will urge you to change your habits, but if you do or if you do not, we expect you will reach a ripe maturity. Were there a danger more imminent, he would not release you back to the world.”

  “Great news,” Ira said.

  “Often, too, the fibrosis of the retina can cause a tension—a tractional detachment—that may cause the retina to detach again,” Doctor Chehade said. “Still, I am optimistic.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? ” Doctor Chehade laughed. “Because I am an excellent surgeon and an optimistic human being—that is why!” he declared. “And because I like you. Because I sense, given how we were drawn to each other, that this is a feeling quite mutual. But let me ask you something else—my true reason for remaining until you regained more thoroughly your consciousness. The question I have been preparing to offer is this: What are your allegiances to the State of Israel?”

  “Excuse me?” Ira said. “What does the State of Israel have to do with my surgery?”

  “I feel a responsibility, as a man of Middle Eastern origin—a man from a civilized Arab nation—to talk to my Jewish friends about this when occasion presents itself. I talk with you as I have often talked with colleagues in the hospital who are of Jewish extraction. I trust you will believe that I am not singling you out.”

  “I’m an American,” Ira said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “And a Jew. Yes, I’m a Jew.”

  “Well, I knew that, but I am glad you have decided to clarify your status. Honesty is a requirement of any true friendship.”

  “What I meant to say is that I’m a Jew, but not an observant or practicing Jew,” Ira said, and immediately wondered why he was offering this information. “Being Jewish does not inform my ordinary, waking life in any particular way,” he went on. “I don’t go to synagogue or observe the holidays—not even those most Jews observe—what we call the High Holy Days, the New Year and our Day of Atonement.”

  “I understand,” Doctor Chehade said. “Of course. I have met Jewish people such as yourself—Americans as well as French and English—and their habits of living conform to your description. You should be assured that I remain a great admirer of your people. Sometimes I think that I admire you more than many Jewish people themselves do—those who, malheureusement , seem to have forgotten who they are, and where they come from, and why they are here.”

  Doctor Chehade steepled his hands below his lips. “You are, you see, a people who believe in One God, who is, of course, the God of all creation. You are a people with great respect for learning, and with traditions of charity, justice, and hospitality very much like those of my own people. You have stayed together—a true community, with common bonds, beliefs, and rituals—despite oppression and plagues, and without, until this past century, a land of your own. The most excellent doctor
s I have known, both here and in my own homeland, have been Jewish. I am proud to call myself your friend and that you have chosen to listen to me, yet at the same time I recognize that you have become fatigued from your ordeals and also, perhaps, confused as to the direction of my discourse. Therefore, I will arrive swiftly at my conclusion.”

  Doctor Chehade stepped back and when he spoke, his voice became stronger, as if he were speaking not only to Ira but to other men, perhaps ten or twelve of whom had entered the room and were gathered around Ira’s bed. Ira wanted to explain why it was that a secular Jew—a lapsed Jew?—was not considered a sinner. But he wondered too: had he somehow—by his behavior, his words, his eagerness to be friends—invited the moment he was now living in?

  “I feel it incumbent upon me when I am with Jewish friends—” Doctor Chehade said “—and I want you to listen very carefully to what I say now—to inform you that although the State of Israel will, in the future as in the past, win many battles, it will not win the war. It cannot.”

  Doctor Chehade took Ira’s free hand in both his own.

  “I see that you are eager to sleep again,” he said, “and I trust it is not because I am boring you. Par conséquent, let me end our dialogue by asserting that I understand that this has been a difficult time for you, and in such a time I do not intend to add to your burdens. Still, while you must understand that I certainly am not against you or your people, you must also understand that history is.”

  Doctor Chehade left the room. Ira closed his good eye. He dreamt of leaving the hospital, of walking the streets of Brooklyn, or Nice—or Jerusalem!—with his wife, and of describing for her what had happened. But damn—why didn’t I see it coming? he heard himself say, and when he did, his wife told him that at least he had the words right, and when he imagined her saying this, he began to laugh out loud—to laugh so hard that a nurse entered his room and asked if he was all right.

  “Oh yes,” he said. He touched his eye patch and began laughing again. “But I was wondering if you could tell me—please?—why it is that I didn’t see it coming.”

  The Turetzky Trio

  Bart parked his car in a garage under a Monoprix store near the center of town, then made his way down toward the market place. He descended slowly, glancing into windows of shops—olive oil and olive wood products, eyeglasses, hardware, perfumes, lingerie, auto supplies—and into open doorways that revealed courtyards, fountains, laundry hanging between buildings. He loved the curving stairways, the chipped stucco walls, the hard unevenness of the stone under his feet, the sound of the French language in his ears.

  It was the first time he had been in Grasse since he and his wife Marjorie had brought their two children here nearly two dozen years before for a tour of one of the city’s perfumeries, and when he arrived at the lower part of town—La Place Aux Aires—he was pleased to find that the market place was essentially as he remembered it: long rows of vendors, their fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, cheeses, linens, soaps, and spices on display, the vendors shouting the praises of their products: poisson frais…! légumes directement du jardin…! bon prix…! bon marché…!

  Marjorie, a senior editor specializing in cookbooks at a New York publishing house, had been reading in the garden of their vacation home when he left. When he kissed her goodby, on the top of her head, she had turned to him and—out of anger? desire?—had pulled him down and pressed her mouth against his, hard.

  The warmth of the sun, on his back and shoulders now that he had passed into the open air of the plaza, reminded him of the force of Marjorie’s hand on the back of his neck, and of how at dusk the evening before the two of them had, on their balcony, held hands while they watched lights come on across the valley below and in Cannes. It was as if they were trying, against probability, to recreate feelings like those they had known in a time before they had married, before they had had children, before the AIDS pandemic had erupted, before they had begun indulging in their liaisons.

  He had a sudden desire to return to the car, to drive back to Marjorie, and to talk with her about doubts and fears that had been with him lately—about the many things he felt he had not, as a man and a doctor, done or achieved. But why such a distinctly unfamiliar urge? Was it his age—he would be sixty in three months—and what he had not told Marjorie, or, more important, talked with a cardiologist about—the occasional shortness of breath he had been experiencing recently? If he lost ten pounds, though—if he exercised more regularly and ate more sensibly, he had confidence that all would be well. Still, he wondered: if he left the world now, would Marjorie miss him?

  More likely, he thought, she would be relieved. Doubtless she would grieve for a while and would talk with the children about what a good and admirable man he was. Surely she would emphasize what the children already knew: that he was highly esteemed by others, especially by those in the world of AIDS with whom he worked. Truth be told, though, he was a good and admirable man mostly—only?— when he was doing for those who were not family to him. When he was with a patient, or mentoring a medical student—that was when he felt good about himself, when he came truly alive.

  He went on his round of the stalls, made his purchases— bread, fish, vegetables, cheese, wine—and when, his panier heavy with goods, he was ready to start the climb back toward the center of town, he found that he was feeling faint. In the shade of the market’s arcade, he took a seat at a café and asked for a pastis, after which he ordered la formule: melon with cured ham, followed by a pavé of grilled rumpsteak with pommes frites.

  He ate slowly, and when he was done, ordered coffee. The coffee was rich and black, and drinking it, he found himself craving a cigarette. He asked his waiter if there was a tabac nearby, patted his pockets to indicate he had no more—“Je n’en ai plus”—and the waiter returned a minute later with a pack of Gitanes—Fumer Tue in bold letters on the pack’s front—tapped out a single cigarette and lit it for Bart.

  Bart drew in on the cigarette, imagined his thoughts, like fumes, floating upward and dissolving in the balm of day. He put on his aviator-style sunglasses and looked around. Who was this man, he imagined people asking. An expatriate writer living in a villa on the Côte d’Azur ? A CIA operative posing as a retired businessman? A gay man sentenced to death, T-cells nearing zero, spending his last days in the place he loved most in the world? An aging actor who had, perhaps, been friends with Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau, and with Cocteau’s lover, the actor Jean Marais…?

  Marais had been living in Spéracèdes when Bart and Marjorie had lived there for several months nearly four decades before, though they had never seen him. They had never seen Picasso either, though he lived a few miles away, in Mougins, and though they had several times parked nearby and walked around the walls of his estate, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When, four months after arriving in Spéracèdes, they decided to get married, they had sent Picasso a check for fifty dollars, telling him this was a wedding gift to themselves and asking if there were anything they could purchase for the fifty dollars. What they received back, now framed and hanging on a wall of their bedroom, was the cancelled check itself, endorsed on the back, a small dove-with-olive-branch sketched beneath Picasso’s signature.

  It occurred to Bart that Marais could, despite his fame, have lived on in Spéracèdes forever without having anyone from the village, much less a tourist, ever see him or bother him (a young man they regularly saw in town performed Marais’s errands), just as Bart could sit at this outdoor café forever without having anyone talk to him, or bother him.

  He asked the waiter for another cigarette, thought of stories he had heard of husbands and wives who said they were going to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes, and who never returned and were never found. He could notify his hospital—Montefiore, in the Bronx—that he had decided to take early retirement—that they should send him whatever papers needed signing and should deposit his pension checks in his bank account.

  He drank the last of his coffe
e—the bitter grounds tasted wonderful, would mask the cigarette taste—and, signalling to the waiter for the check, realized that a woman, a cup of coffee at her lips, was watching him. She smiled, inclined her head slightly.

  He paid the check, walked to the woman’s table. “You’re Leah Turetzky, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “May I join you?”

  She gestured with a hand, indicating that he could.

  “My wife and I saw you at Lincoln Center three or four years ago,” he said. “You played the Schubert B flat Trio, one of my wife’s favorites, and I remember that you wore a burgundy gown, trimmed with black lace. We were planning to go to your concert tomorrow evening, but a question first, if you’ll allow me: Why The Turetzky Duo instead of Trio? When we were in Cannes the day before yesterday, my wife and I saw a poster and…”

  He was aware that he was talking quickly, and that he was not, as he usually was in these situations, relaxed and confident. He waited a few seconds, but she waited too, her gaze steady, slightly bemused.

  “Actually, my wife and I arrived only a week ago,” he said, “but when I saw the poster, I wondered about what happened.”

  “My husband Alex died five weeks ago.”

  Bart blinked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so glib, and—” He stopped. “I don’t really know what to say.”

  “He died in Paris, which was his favorite city,” Leah said. “We’d been to the opera—Manon—and we were drinking champagne, a custom of ours after attending opera—and he suddenly sat up in bed, opened his mouth wide, said a very quiet ‘Oh!’ and then was gone. It was his heart, of course—his first attack, and his last. The pain seemed minimal, though how is anyone to know really?”

  She took out a cigarette, handed Bart a matchbook so he could light it for her. “We decided to go ahead with the tour, Eugene and I—Eugene is Alex’s brother, our violinist—and all things considered, this seemed best.”