Apart From Love (40 page)

And aloud he says, “Anita? Want to dance?”

Over the last couple of months he hasn’t given voice to no anger, and neither have I, which I figure can’t hardly be bad, ‘cause without words any feeling—even rage—can peter out, so that one of these days, it’s gonna be left there, dull and limp, somewhere behind us. It can happen, ‘cause his son isn’t here between us, and time passes.
 

Like ma used to say, Time heals all wounds. Which sounds pretty stale, but it must be true, ‘cause I’ve stopped thinking by now about my youth going to waste. Instead I’m thinking about the fact that I’ve stopped thinking about that.
 

So in the end, we’re back where we started, almost. Lenny’s my man. He’s mine. Me, I’m his. All’s clear. Nothing gets confused.
 

“Well?” he murmurs. “Do you?”

I reckon the reason he’s talking to me, like, under his breath, isn’t only because he’s unsure of me, of what I’ll say after the long, icy silence—but also because he can’t stand the echo, which seems to have moved in here with us lately.
 

So I whisper, as soft as I can, “I do.”
 

He inserts one of them tapes, and sets the tape recorder to
Rewind
, then
Play
. At first I almost expect
my
voice to come on, but then, by the spring in his step as he’s coming over, I figure it’s gonna be music. He reaches out to me, so I peel off his glove, and his touch feels nice, it’s warm and strong, the way I remember it.
 

Lenny helps me out of the sofa, which is good, ‘cause I feel pretty heavy lately, and if I stand up by myself I tend to stop, just to look down to check if I my feet can still be spotted there, under the round mound of my belly.

I rise into his arms, and note that his forehead comes down more heavily than ever, right over his eyebrows, and the crease in the middle—which as always, remind me of my pa—is deeper now. He must have shrunk a little, too. Maybe not, maybe it’s just something I imagine.
 

Now Lenny lays his hands on my hips, careful at first, like we’re strangers. If we was strangers for real, things would get wilder, faster. I draw a bit closer, and put my hand on his shoulder, and rise to the tips of my toes to reach up, to comb his thinning hair, awful gentle, with my fingers. I slick it back, ‘cause in my eyes it’s always made him look so handsome, like one of them old movie stars.
 

In turn, his hand brushes my hair, gathering it up, for a second, into a pony tail, and I close my eyelids, feeling how at first he hesitates. The old man waits there for a long while, before leaning over and kissing them.
 

I bet that like me, he remembers that night, the first time we danced, ‘cause now that the tape recorder has finished giving out the long, rustling hush, and the music comes on, it’s the old song, doubled by a ghost of its sound: s
omething slow from the sixties, which years ago used to bring tears to ma’s eyes, ‘cause like, it awakened her to being lonely, and now it brings them to mine.

Lenny cups my face in his hand and pecks me lightly on the cheek. Then he starts showering me with the littlest kisses, all along the trail of tears, his mouth slipping down the skin of my neck. And I laugh—not only on account of being ticklish, but because suddenly I’m aroused, and even a touch nervous. And I say, “Let’s just dance,” which is echoed, like, by the laughter of the walls.

So Lenny backs away and I come, and then in reverse, he comes as I back away, and we go and come, come and go this way for a long while—but we don’t hardly move from the same spot, here by the sofa, even though there’s so much space now around us, for dancing and what not.
 

It’s not only me wondering about it—it’s Beethoven as well, his blank eyes following every one of our moves from down there, on the floor, like he’s annoyed at his bad luck, having to witness all this—and in slow motion, too!—and his neck, despite being solid, must be terribly cramped, and like, he hopes to be relieved of that pain pretty soon,
 
and stretch his neck, and could we please stop idling there like some tired old couple, and come stomping off in his direction, and break it already.
 

By now Lenny has undone the buttons of my blouse, and he loosens it this way and that, and then, in one firm pull it’s already down, which allows him to take one breast in his mouth, and lick the skin all around it.
 

At once, my nipple grows big. He gives it up in favor of the other one, which he starts sucking. Now I’m divided between my two halves, ‘cause the first breast, which is wet, starts cooling off as it dries, and the second is like, burning. I twist my body side to side, to offer him first the one, then the other, and again.

Pretty soon we go out of order, and in a heated haste we find ourselves tossing the pillows of the sofa to the floor, first the pillow out of what is usually his corner, then the one out of mine, and we stumble rolling down, till we land on top of them, more or less. So he cocks his head, looking up at me, waiting, ‘cause like, now it’s me on top. And it’s at that second, just as I start groping for the zipper of his crutch, that—out of the blue—the doorbell rings.
   

But like, there’s nobody there.

By the time Lenny returns from the door, I’ve crossed the floor on all four, all the way to Beethoven, and turned him around so he don’t face us no more, and instead he points his nose at the corner, and I’ve come right back to lay, in a foxy pose, on them pillows.
 

But somehow, I know that Lenny knows that we ain’t exactly in the mood no more.

“Who—who was that?” I ask.

And he says, “No one.”

And I point at what he carries behind him, in his hand, “And what’s this?”

And shrugging, he says, “Don’t know.”

And I say, “So, open it.”

And real stubborn, he says, “Don’t want to.”

So half nude I rush to the kitchen, and bring a kitchen knife and cut through the flap of the box, and there—to my surprise—lays a bottle of Rosé Champagne, flanked by two stemmed glasses, the kind you can stack in layers to build them champagne towers, like the one we had at our wedding.

At first, my bet is that this is a gift from my husband—who else—which takes my breath away, it’s so cool, so awesome, especially because I haven’t gotten nothing from him lately.
 

So I twist my hips walking up to him, and snatch one of them glasses and put it in place, right over my left breast. Before I got pregnant, and become so full of curves, it would have been a perfect fit—but now, not so much.
 

Then, just before opening my mouth to ask him to uncork the bottle, I realize my mistake.
 

“Take it off, take that thing off right now, right this minute,” he stammers, and his forehead curves down over him even heavier and more wrinkled than before. I can’t even blame him, or no one, ‘cause really, I reckon it’s too late for us.
 

So without saying a word I obey him, and remove the glass from my heart, and watch him, again in silence, as he rummages through the box in search of a note, or something. Which he finds, finally, down there at the bottom. In square, printed letters the note reads simply, “To Anita.”
 

No return address, no signature, no date, nothing.
 

The old man looks long and hard into my eyes, like he’s searching for answers, not exactly sure if to punish me, like I was a naughty school girl, or to send me back home to my ma. After a while he figures he can’t do neither, so he just turns his back on me, and punches the box so it can collapse on itself, and stuffs it in the garbage can, along with the uncorked bottle and them two glasses. Then he goes to the bathroom, and the water starts running for his shower.
 

I try not to be angry, or hurt. I sit there in the dark, and wait. I can’t tell exactly what it is I’m waiting for.
 

So,
Rewind. Record
.
 

What is there to say? I reckon it’s stupid, it don’t make no sense to hunger so bad for a change. Still... It’s a strange feeling, knowing that someone out there is playing with a thought about me, daring me to risk everything I’ve got, like, this marriage, this shelter for my baby and me—all for nothing. For a bottle of champagne.

The water’s still running in the shower, wisps of vapor escaping as far as here in the living room. By now the glass door is all steamed out, so the balcony out there, which is facing ours, is pretty much washed out, and you can’t see the wintery sky no more, and you can’t even tell that it’s moonless. And like, everything is suddenly nothing but a guess—except for one thing:
 

I swear, I must be crazy. I know I am, ‘cause the only path to see clear out of this place is through what I write here, into the steam, on the cold, hard surface, with my finger.

Ben
.

As Told by Ben

O
f one thing I am certain this time: The source of trouble between my father and me is nothing else but that book, or whatever he is calling that thing which he is trying so hard to put together. I can understand why you laugh. If someone said this to me I would laugh, too. Still, it is the one explanation that fits the string of events, and it makes increasingly more sense to me, the more I reflect on it. Which is what I have been doing ever since he threw me out. Yes, for once I am certain, and it took me four months of following him, and of being invisible.

For all his faults, I have never found reason to doubt how deeply my father loves me, which makes his anger so devastating now, and also, so puzzling to me—not just the anger itself, but the constancy of it, the fact that it would not relent, not even to let him answer my letters, which by now, I have stopped sending.

So every evening I find myself drawn back to that place. I pass through the back alley, wrapped in a knitted, black scarf all the way up to my ears. It is tied in a thick knot around my neck, cloaking me as if to ward off the cold.
 

I slip into the bushes at the side of the apartment building, behind the large garbage cans. This is where I take my time, to let my eyes grow used to the dusk. If the light comes on in his balcony—as it often does, around this hour—or, if the glass door suddenly squeals along its rail, I sink back into the darkest dark. Here I cast a quick glance around, to make certain no one is there to see me, or to sense the surge of my heart, and I wait, till I see him coming out.
 

Then, when at last my heartbeat grows calm, I draw near—but not too near, so there is no way for the old man to suspect that I am here, at such a close range, looking up at him. And even if he did, I trust that he is blinded by the light of the desk lamp, and cannot find me out here, in the shadows. So I stand below his balcony for a long time, not a muscle stirring, and watch him.
 

I see the desk lamp flickering across his glasses. From time to time he pushes them, with one finger, up his nose. I see the reflection of his hands, large hands wearing fingerless leather gloves, going at the keyboard in spurts of punched sequences. His eyes shine then with inspiration. Other times—when he is betrayed by his muse—he stops typing altogether, and even curses himself out loud.
 

Then he scratches some corrections into the sheet of paper, and the creaking of his chair gets more frequent, more pronounced. After a while, a faint voice comes on. The first time I heard it—it was late December, I think—I found myself strangely moved. It compelled me to risk revealing myself.
 

So without taking a second to think, I clung to a drain pipe going up the next building, fumbled about, climbed onto a crack, or a nick, or maybe it was some missing brick in the wall. I nearly faltered, and then—in one leap—flung myself up into a balcony, the one opposite his, which was, as luck would have it, empty.
 

From here I glanced back at him, afraid he might have detected the rattle of the railing, which was, unfortunately, still going on, vibrating in the air, even though I tried to make it stop already, by gripping the metal bars, bringing them to a freeze in my hands—but no: there he was, crossing something out, then crumpling his papers furiously and starting over, as if nothing else in the whole world mattered.