You Are My Heart and Other Stories Page 7

  When people asked why she left you, and would suggest, thinking this would console me, that perhaps she’d suffered some kind of mental breakdown, I’d nod knowingly, as if the suggestion had merit, and say that perhaps what troubled your mother could be found in the psychiatric encyclopedia of mental disorders—the infamous DSM—under the letter A. Under ‘A?’ they’d ask. Yes, I’d say: A… for ‘Absence of Character.’

  How else respond to such a foolish question? Still, you must wonder at times about what she (this woman you never truly knew) was like, and, allied to this question, what I saw-in-her that led to love, marriage, and bringing you into the world.

  And the answer?

  Simple: We were young, she was beautiful, and she told me—insecure, neurotic young Jewish boy that I was—that she loved me. You’ve seen pictures, of course, but they don’t begin to capture the seductive wholesomeness of her beauty: a blond-haired, blue-eyed, corn-fed Midwesterner (from Iowa: the heart of corn country)—a cheerful cheerleader with a perfect gleaming American smile and a perpetual blush in her cheeks, crossed with a full-bodied, voluptuous Scandinavian (think: Liv Ullman, Anita Ekberg)—an exquisitely desirable woman who, after she’d told me she loved me, said two additional things that sealed the deal: first, that she believed—she knew, she just knew!—I was going to become a truly great writer; and second, that I was the most wonderful lover she’d ever known.

  And let me tell you, son, as I discovered too late in the game, when it came to the latter, she knew whereby she spoke. But (sigh!) even irony and distance cannot keep away the return, in memory, of the excruciating feelings of hurt, shame, and helplessness that came with my discovery of her several lovers, which news was soon followed by her leave-taking, which act itself (the better miracle, for it gave us our years together, you and me) was preceded, as I noted above, by the arrival of a constant, gnawing pain, along with sensations of a kind I’d never before known: I kept falling into a darkness more terrifying than the absence of the dimmest light—into a hole that was at the same time somehow a hollow within me, so that I felt I was disappearing into myself again and again, and without any clue as to how to stop—or name!—the falling.

  To give you an inkling (ink link?) of how my baleful innocence was destroyed: we were to meet for lunch at the university’s Faculty Club, and I arrived early (to have twenty minutes or so in which to rework a lecture I was preparing on Henry James-the-Irishman), went to the men’s room to wash up, heard a strange gutteral sound, found the stall where the sound was coming from, opened the door, and there was your mother, skirt up around her waist, sitting astride a young man—he worked as a busboy at the club—who was himself sitting on an open toilet, his pants gathered around his ankles. ‘Good afternoon, Professor Klein,’ he said, with great good manners. ‘Sorry to see you here so early today.’ And your mother, over her shoulder, her eyes filled with lust-fulfilled bliss, ‘Oh Sam, we really do have to stop meeting like this…’

  I hurried home from the Faculty Club, and when she joined me, and when I wept and said the obvious—bad enough that you were doing it, but you knew I would be there—We had a date!—she said of course she knew—that was the point, after all, for didn’t this non-coincidence answer the pertinent questions? But I was a helpless, wounded beggar—distraught, destroyed, disabled. The rage, and its faithful companion, clinical depression, were to come later, though I don’t think she sensed this, or ever gave such possibilities much thought. On that afternoon, however, she did for a while sit beside me, stroke my hair, and wipe my tears away. What I think, she said before she left, is that I was trying to get your attention.

  The rest—what I knew and when I knew it—is theme and variation, and my conclusion is that it turned out to be our great good fortune that once she left, she never returned. Her life, such as it became, is a void too—a mystery—though of decreasing interest. Out of sight became, literally, out of mind. Another conclusion, perhaps a trifle too generous on my part: that her intention was not to humiliate me, but more simply (mindlessly?) to please herself. The shameless narcissism—the unthinking sense of entitlement of an unusually beautiful, and, then as now (pace Orwell’s warning about double-negatives), not unintelligent woman, seemed a not unnatural phenomenon.

  There were annual birthday cards from her to you, the last when you were twelve, but the envelopes were without return addresses, and I chose not to give you the cards. Why stir up unanswerable questions, or feelings that were beyond gratification? I myself had several New Year’s cards from her, with uncharacteristically bland greetings: ‘with love’ or ‘kind regards’ or ‘wishing you a year of health, happiness, and adventure’—and also a letter congratulating me on the publication of my novel, Prizefighter, hoping it would be the first of many successes (as of this writing, there has never been a successor—her hope, then, become a curse that I embraced?), and noting that the scene in which the protagonist discovers his girlfriend has cheated on him suggested to her that I had not yet gotten over what she saw as inconsequential dalliances of a kind that occurred in most—her word—mature marriages. ‘Grow up, Sam,’ she advised.

  Once she left, she never inquired about you. But if she had, I might have informed her that instead of killing you, or her, or myself, I had decided to live, and that it was you, Charlie—her son—who, unwittingly, saved all our lives. You didn’t know that, did you?

  How it happened: I had begun drinking even before your mother left us. On a daily basis, the numbing of senses—along with the resultant dizziness, fogged mind, and clogged sleep—got me through. I’d pour a bit of Scotch (Dewar’s) into my coffee at the start of the day; while receiving students in my office, I’d fill and refill a mug from a flask I kept in my bottom-right desk drawer; and when I arrived home I’d treat myself to the drink I told myself I was entitled to after a long day’s work. On teaching days I left you in a nursery school, three blocks away, run by two Amherst College faculty wives, both of whom, on random occasions, without, as far as I know, their sharing confidences, I plowed royally, despite or because of the alcohol that had me working hard not to call them, in the throes, by one another’s names.

  But what your mother called her ‘dalliances’—and what a colleague who’d been one of those favored by her generosity called her ‘open-legs policy,’ a policy that favored at least two other department colleagues (a ‘most favored nations policy?’), along with perhaps three of my male graduate students, and two female undergraduate honors students (to her credit, she did not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, or race)—utterly destroyed me. In her presence, hoping to get some purchase on what seemed an increasingly fragile world—an apology perhaps, a vow to reform and start over, an acknowledgement of the effect of her actions on me, a suggestion that we sign up for couples counseling—I was all fumbling and trembling. The only thing I wanted was to save our marriage and family, to make her stop having lovers, and to have her love me again.

  But I do love you, she would say. And really, Sam, why the surprise? Haven’t you always said that the great thing in life was to remain open to possibility (a phrase I had, to my chagrin, used frequently during our courtship, especially when in pursuit of specific physical attentions)?

  Didn’t I agree, given our mutual love of sensuality—of polymorphous perversity—that the prospect of making love with one person and one person only for the next half century was absurd? Didn’t I see that her act had been a gift, and would enable us, dans le style français, to remain together for the duration? Moreover, your mother declared, what she did when she was not at home was her private life, and hadn’t I, in at least two essays about the decline of the novel from its cultural centrality, linked this decline to the parallel (and lamentable) decline in our valuation of privacy?

  Her words—the news, the facts—fell on tender ears, and on a sensibility—and ego—too blue and bruised to bear them. I was a failure—as husband, father, man—and would never recover from what everyone would surely see as
well-earned punishment. Her arguments, such as they were (to her credit, she never attempted to convince me of anything), though I could acknowledge their merits, passed me by.

  What did not pass by was the knowledge that I had turned out to be much more a man of my generation and upbringing than I had acknowledged—‘distressingly conventional,’ was your mother’s judgment—for I had clearly (and mistakenly) believed that if vows of love and marriage were exchanged, like the bodily intimacies that were their physical manifestations, they were intended to be honored eternally. Although your mother and I were born of the same generation, she had somehow escaped—evolved from?—values of fidelity I, and most people I grew up with, had pledged obedience to. I couldn’t, that is, bear knowing that what she gave to me, she bestowed freely (happily?) on others. In me, I discovered, jealousy easily trumped rationality, even though I knew—could proclaim—that jealousy was itself merely the illusion of possession.

  But oh my, the power of that illusion in my imagination. At first, all I wanted was for her to forgive me, for me to forgive her, for her to forgive me for my difficulty in forgiving her, et cetera et cetera. But when—to test me?—she suggested we have her favorite graduate student (not the busboy, but another) move in with us—he could, she argued, help with you, Charlie, and with chores (feedings, diapers, babysitting, lawn mowing), and help us renew what clearly, to judge from my upset, was in need of renewal. When I said no—no, never, jamais, mai, nunca, nunquam, over my dead body—genug!—she simply smiled, said I could have things my way, and left. I didn’t see her for the next four days or nights, and these were the first evenings, and mornings, when my closest friend became Dewar’s. In fact, on the fifth morning after her absence, she found me on the bathroom floor, lying in my puke while you wailed away in your crib.

  Though you’re pitiable, she said (she used the French pénible, a deft touch, thereby connoting both pitiable and pathetic, and helping the dagger of her betrayal to penetrate more easily), I don’t pity you, and I certainly don’t want to listen to that little lump of flesh and diarrhea (a reference to you, son) crying all day. So I’m out of here, Sam.

  I managed to get to my feet and wash my face, and she smiled at me with what seemed genuine kindness: We gave it our best, she said. I believe we really did. But it’s not for me, this marriage-mommy thing, and better that we know it sooner than later, wouldn’t you agree?

  I agreed, of course. Yes, I said. Oh sure. Of course. Bien sûr. Whatever you say. Whatever you want! And then we were two, and I picked you up, set you down on the changing table, changed your diaper, and rocked you in my arms, and thought, were this a story, what suggestion could I make that would lend it credibility, or, better still, sympathy for its protagonist? And as soon as I asked, the answer was there—the old writer’s standby, courtesy of Messrs. Twain and Faulkner: You must kill your darlings.

  The fantasy, along with drink, did, as I said earlier, help get me through. What part of me believed, you see, was that the best and only way to get back at her and hurt her badly was to hurt you (her son, after all). But no Medea, moi—and, give thanks to whatever gods that be, no Greek tragedy in the House of Klein either. At the time I didn’t think through the idea of doing away with us, or believe in it—it seemed, simply, the only solution to ending the pain, which dragged with it a thunderous noise that had taken to traveling in a continual, merciless loop through the marrow of my bones.

  In truth, I don’t think I believed much of anything that year, which may be why it seems missing. And it has always seemed missing, obviously, because I was missing—in action, and in in-action. Though I try now and then to summon up memories—à la recherche, Sam, I cry out silently; à la recherche !—I recall few details: I slept, I ate, I taught, I shaved, I pissed, I shat, and I drank; I shopped, I cooked, I fed us, I put you to sleep, I took you to nursery school, I picked you up from nursery school, I took you to the doctor, I talked to you, I talked with you, I bought you clothes, I dressed you, I changed your diapers, I toilet-trained you, I helped you learn to walk and to ride a tricycle, and I probably took some delight in your development. You were the best and brightest of them all, the nursery school ladies told me, as did a coterie of grad student babysitters (several of whom offered to stay the night, invitations I wisely, though not without ambivalence, declined): before you were fifteen months old, you could play simple games of cards (‘War,’ ‘Go-Fish’), pick out favorite CDs, sing songs on-key and hold to your part in rounds, ice-skate on double runners, and laugh at jokes. You were also enormously responsive, affectionate, and trusting, though given our circumstances, who can figure why.

  A for-instance: Once, putting you to bed at night, a glass of Jim Beam in hand (seven and a half months following your mother’s departure, in a decision I considered to be a mark of incipient maturity, I had switched from Scotch to bourbon), you asked for a taste, and I dipped my finger in, let you lick it.

  So what’s your daddy’s favorite drink? I asked, and when you looked puzzled, I gave you the answer: Why, the next one, of course—!

  You cracked up—a bubbling belly laugh that had you clapping your hands and rolling around in your crib. Did you understand the joke? Were you just being silly? Were you reacting to the way I was laughing at my own joke? Were you laughing because you thought laughing would please me…?

  Six weeks and two days after your first birthday, I received papers from a lawyer, informing me that your mother wanted nothing from me except my agreement to a divorce, and to be able to retrieve some personal possessions. In this, I suppose, her behavior was admirable. If I agreed not to contest the divorce, we could take legal and permanent leave of each other within ninety days, with no monies or properties exchanged or owed.

  It was done, and the finality of documents and signatures, once processed and approved by a court, went a long way in helping to thicken the heavy, sooty fog in which I lived. No matter what words I or anyone put on it, let me tell you: there is nothing as awful as feeling so deeply sad that to leave the world seems not only, in prospect, a relief, but just ! How much better life would be for everyone else were I gone! What a gift to the world my absence would be! But if I did it solo, I feared, she would get you, or, if she demurred, the courts would get you, and such thoughts also held me back.

  And there was also time—the passage of time, more exactly. At some point in the thirteenth month of my sorrows, the beast inside mind and body seemed to tire of me a bit (out of boredom, I hypothesized), and I noticed, too, that I was taking occasional pleasure from simple things—eating, sleeping, holding your hand on walks, watching you eat, or sleep, or play with your toy cars and building blocks—and I began to have a distaste, not for bourbon—never, never, never—but for the foggy dizziness it induced. Then you fell.

  I was, as usual, moderately sloshed, and it was your bedtime, and I had a stack of papers to grade, a few rolled and tucked snugly under my left arm, and I was very upset with you because you’d soiled yourself. Why? Why were you doing this to me? You’d been toilet-trained for six or seven weeks, we’d both taken pride in the achievement, and you’d graduated from your crib to a bed—the top half of the old hi-riser that had served as my childhood bed. Why now? Had I not been paying you enough attention? Were you angry with me? Were you missing your mother, or one of our babysitters (you’d taken an especial shine to a vixenish young woman named Robyn Henderson, who, by infiltrating your affections, was determined to have your father infiltrate her moist, secret places), or…

  Who knew? What I do know is that when I smelled the presence of the foul deed, and asked if you had done it, I was already too angry for anyone’s good, and when you grinned with a fiendish look of feigned innocence, and said, ‘I don’t know, Daddy,’ I lost it.

  So I did what I did sometimes: I let loose with words as if I were battering a punching bag with them—How many times have I told you this or that, and What’s the matter with you, you ungrateful little schmuck, and When the fuck are you
going to grow up, and I have no patience left for you, and additional choice and self-pitying gabble about having to do everything, everything, everything by myself. Give me a break, you little shithead, you and your shit-filled pants! I screamed. Just give me a fucking break, you stupid lump of clumped, rotten turds! In my fury, and without at first letting go of the student papers, I grabbed you—snatched you—and carried you in the crook of my right arm up the stairs and into your room, where I tried to hoist you up onto the changing table. But the flight of stairs had made the bourbon produce a major shimmer of nausea—Hey, I wanted to shout to the world: Look at the noble, dead drunk dumb daddy doing his goddamned dumb thing!—and as I lifted you with the intent of slamming you down on the table—smashing you!—you slipped out of my grasp, and for an instant, as in the memory of car crashes, all went into sickly slow motion: I saw you falling, and I saw that your head had turned upside down, and that the exposed and sharp iron corner of your bed was in perfect position to receive your skull—and yet you smiled at me with the most loving, trusting smile I had ever seen or expect ever to see again.

  You had no fear, Charlie. You seemed to believe that if I were taking care of you, no harm could come your way. How ever, ever forget your sublime calm—the loving trust in your eyes?

  I dropped the student papers, scooped you up before you hit the bed’s flanged corner (‘A fumble recovered, folks!’ I heard an announcer proclaim), cleaned you up, and dressed you in freshly laundered pajamas. ‘Sorry, Daddy,’ you said and, when you noticed the glimmering film in my eyes, you asked if I’d hurt myself.