Apart From Love (48 page)

At first I considered omitting it altogether. I debated with myself, thinking I should do so not only because it had been published previously, but because its events were clearly outside the principal scope of time.
 

It is worth noting that in this fragment, the character (apparently representing the author as a young man) acted as if he were utterly inexperienced with women, which was starkly different from the way he would have presented himself these days.
   

In all, seven notebooks were discovered, one in a secret desk drawer, the rest in one pile, under a heap of sheet music that laid on the floor, in the corner of the living room, under a marble bust of Beethoven.
 

The notebooks were of different bindings, shapes and sizes, and contained written or typed blurbs of text, which appeared so tight and so dense as to make reading practically impossible.
 

To decode their meaning I had to look at them through a magnifying glass, and then, with a fine brush, mark tiny white dots between the letters, in places where I figured that spaces should have occurred.
 

In several cases, the pages were clearly out of order. It took me the better part of a month to set them in place; more precisely, in what I assumed to be the right place. As the author would say: it seemed as if someone had cast the notebook up in the air, and let the pages fall as they may, descending like parachutes behind enemy lines.
 

- One notebook, which (by its paper quality) appeared to be the oldest among them, was hand written in blue ink on brittle, yellow papers, which were originally stitched together to form a notebook. Most of them seem to have fallen out of place. They were found in the so-called
secret drawer
, crumpled and stuffed into it completely out of order.

- Three other notebooks were in fact legal pads (with my office logo on top) which I must have given the author, I suppose, some time ago, in one meeting or another.

- Another notebook consisted of a fake leather binding, clasped together to hold a few Xerox copies of the same fragment. The original, however, was never recovered.
 

- Another notebook held loose notes, which the author made to himself, containing various (seemingly unrelated) flowery phrases. There is no mention of any of these phrases in any fragment of this book. Perhaps he considered making use of them in some future story. Some of the notes were written on the back of a checkbook. Others were printed on the back an old music sheet. One, with a simple drawing of a heart, was scribbled inside a paper napkin.

- A bunch of papers were simply stapled together in one corner, and preserved under the green-tinted glass, which laid, a bit askew, on top of the desk.

The author made corrections by hand in the margins of these papers. He did so in pens and pencils of different colors, some of which have already faded. Thus, to my disappointment, some phrases have grown entirely illegible by now.
 

However, in a number of cases I detected what I thought was a rather feminine handwriting, which seemed suspiciously different from that of the author (in slant, size and shape).
 

Whoever it was, she attempted making various corrections, most of which were utterly crude. Words were badly misspelled, and there were glaring grammatical errors. Therefore, acting as the editor and custodian of the text, I decided to ignore such corrections.
 

In addition to the notebooks, two audiotapes were found, only a week ago, neatly wrapped behind the bottom drawer of the author’s desk, which explained, incidentally, why it had never closed properly.
 

- One audiotape was labeled “Beethoven’s Fifth” and dated eleven years ago.
 

- The other was labeled “Benjamin, Age 12” and dated sixteen years ago.
 

The voice on the second audiotape was clearly a child’s voice. However, halfway through the audiotape it was overwritten (accidentally, I assume) by a soft, slightly raspy voice, closely resembling that of the second wife. Then, towards the end of her discourse, some commotion can be heard in the background: a voice, presumably the author’s, shouting loudly, “No! Not that one—” and then, nothing. Nothing but crickets.

The discovery of the second audiotape shed some light on his writing method. By no means can it be regarded as a simple case of transcribing. I took great care to study it in detail.
 

First I compared the recorded child’s voice to its corresponding fragment (titled
Only An Empty Dress
). Then I compared the recorded voice of the second wife to its corresponding fragment (titled
In My Defense
). Only then did it become apparent to me that the author had invested considerable effort, in both thought and time, to shape the raw input and flesh it out into moments.
 

Perhaps that was what he had meant by the ‘preservation of time.’ Indeed, the author strove hard to bring out what he considered the essence of each moment. Thus, in conveying the first half of this audiotape to paper, he downplayed certain passages, making them much shorter than originally recorded, especially where the child’s voice became excessively verbose, or was lost in repetition (of the same emotion or idea).
 

In conveying the second half, he corrected some of the most atrocious grammatical errors (in places where he deemed them overbearing). However, he left enough of them in place, perhaps to keep the voice of his second wife vibrant and thus, authentic.

According to her, these two audiotapes were the only ones left out of an immensely large ‘collection of voices’.
 

However, a third audiotape was found only a day ago, in the corner behind the marble bust of Beethoven. How I missed it on my previous searches is quite beyond me. Its audio quality is poor, to the point of sounding scratchy, probably because it had been recorded over previous (now lost) content, several times over.
 

In spite of this I managed to hear some of the passages, which I have been transcribing all night long, the author’s pen trembling in my hand, and which you can read in the last two fragments:
Lay Me Down
and
Play. Stop. Eject.

There is no telling where the rest of the audiotapes might be found.

Until the very last moment before submitting this text for publication, I plan on reading and rereading it, looking for gaps in chronology, logical misalignments between fragments, even outright errors, which might have escaped me. I am still tormented by my own doubts as to this editorial guesswork.
 

Therefore I would not put it past you, the reader, to sense some dissatisfaction, as I do, in the current state of this book. It was unfinished, and still is.
 

I wish I could be more confident of its veracity and completeness. I wish I could do more. This, I suppose, is the nature of the quest for truth—even if it is truth in fiction.

Written with passionate conviction, this story is being told by two of its characters: Ben, a twenty-seven years old student, and Anita, a plain-spoken, spunky, uneducated girl, freshly married to Lenny, his aging father. Behind his back, Ben and Anita find themselves increasingly drawn to each other. They take turns using an old tape recorder to express their most intimate thoughts, not realizing at first that their voices are being captured by him.

Meanwhile, Lenny is trying to keep a secret from both of them: his ex-wife, Ben’s mother, a talented pianist, has been stricken with an early-onset alzheimer. Taking care of her gradually weighs him down.

What emerges in these characters is a struggle, a desperate, daring struggle to find a path out of conflicts, out of isolation, from guilt to forgiveness.

The title Apart From Love comes from a phrase used three times in the story:

After a while I whispered, like, “Just say something to me. Anything.” And I thought, Any other word apart from Love, ‘cause that word is diluted, and no one knows what it really means, anyway.

Anita to Lenny, in
Apart From Love

Why, why can’t you say nothing? Say any word
—
but that one, ‘cause you don’t really mean it. Nobody does. Say anything, apart from Love.

Anita to Ben, in
The Entertainer

For my own sake I should have been much more careful. Now—even in her absence—I find myself in her hands, which feels strange to me. I am surrounded—and at the same time, isolated. I am alone. I am apart from Love.

Ben, in
Nothing Surrendered

Uvi Poznansky is a California-based author, poet and artist. She earned a Master of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy N.Y. and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. Recently she has published two children books,
Jess and Wiggle
and
Now I Am Paper
.
Apart From Love
is her debut novel.

• Chapter 1: The White Piano
  
• Chapter 2: Father And Son
  
• Chapter 3: No Omelette For Me
  
• Chapter 4: Apart From Love
  
• Chapter 5: It Is Not Too Late
  
• Chapter 6: A Promise, Aborted
  
• Chapter 7: N Over L
  
• Chapter 8: A Woman, Forgotten
  
• Chapter 9: Where Was There
  
• Chapter 10: Keeper Of Secrets
  
• Chapter 11: In My Defense
  
• Chapter 12: A Place Called Sunrise
  
• Chapter 13: She Is Looking Out The Window
  
• Chapter 14: The Family We Are
  
• Chapter 15: Go Back To Your Mama
  
• Chapter 16: My Own Voice
  
• Chapter 17: Leonard And Lana
  
• Chapter 18: The Entertainer
  
• Chapter 19: Nothing Surrendered
  
• Chapter 20: Above All, Survival
  
• Chapter 21: The Heartbeat
  
• Chapter 22: Dead Man’s Fingers
  
• Chapter 23: A Wall. A Space. A Wall
  
• Chapter 24: Only An Empty Dress
  
• Chapter 25: The Naked Bulb
  
• Chapter 26: She Deserves Better
  
• Chapter 27: A Price Would Be Paid
  
• Chapter 28: Bei Mir Bistu Shein
  
• Chapter 29: The Long Wait
  
• Chapter 30: The Source of Trouble
  
• Chapter 31: Around Me Around Him
  
• Chapter 32: No Second Look
  
• Chapter 33: Not The End
  
• Chapter 34: Am I Covered
  
• Chapter 35: Lay Me Down
  
• Chapter 36: Play. Stop. Eject
  
• Appendix 1: Editorial Notes
  
• Appendix 2: About The Story
  
• Appendix 3: About The Author