Don't I Know You? (14 page)

He was miserable. She couldn't imagine feeling as she had felt the other day in his hallway, pressed up against the wall. She couldn't believe she had thought about running for the door. She couldn't imagine him committing murder.

“I hit her,” he said. “Very hard.” He raised his arm across his face, the back of his hand facing Lily. “Like this,” he said. He swung his arm. The air moved across Lily's face.

“And like this,” he said. He cupped his hand and swung it back through the space between them.

Backhanded, she thought. Cuffed. Sentences filled her mind like bricks.
She was backhanded. He cuffed her
.

“What did she do?” she asked.

He was crying. “She was so small,” he said. “What could she do? I am big.” He squeezed his eyes shut and took breaths through his mouth as if he'd been jogging for miles. “I don't like to think about it,” he said.

“Neither do I,” said Lily.

“I wish it were a different story,” he said.

“So do I,” she said.

He opened his eyes, as if she'd hit on the heart of the issue. “You see why I was scared,” he said.

Lily wasn't sure what the heart of this issue was.

“Even now,” he said. “You're thinking you'll have to leave.”

He was right. She
was
. It wasn't the only thing she was thinking.

She held up the card with the photo of the rice bowl. “What about this?” she said.

“I wrote them to Gina's son. I wanted him to feel not so alone.” He shrugged. “I liked him,” he added.

“Why didn't you sign your name?” she asked.

“I didn't want to be connected with his mother,” he said. “Selfish. I know.”

They sat there with the card between them.

“Without you, I cannot live,” he said.

She had been thinking the same thing. She'd survive, but living a life where every day she woke up lucky and charmed, as if beneath everything she did or said, she could feel her blood running its roundabout course? That life she wouldn't have without him.

She took his hand. He began crying again. She was crying too. It was like after they made love, when they were astonished, when tears were the only available response and turned out to be appropriate.

“I believe you didn't do it,” she said.

He kissed her hand, knuckle by knuckle. He kissed the spot on her third finger where her wedding ring would go.

It was not just his kisses. She was telling the truth: she didn't believe it. Though he was capable of it.

She was going to marry a man capable of murder. It was sitting
at the edge of a cliff, feet dangling. It was swinging so high, your bottom lifted from the seat. It was the drastic dip of an airplane before it righted itself.

It was nothing she'd ever dreamed of. It was nothing she'd known to ask for. It was something she wouldn't give up.

L
ouise Carpanetti had cancer. Her young doctor had told her that morning in a dimly lit room in the clinic.
The Cancer
, her mother and aunts used to call it, as if referring to the president. Because the doctor had a soft spot for Italian grandmother types, at first he'd told her a year, maybe more. He'd also told her about treatment: radiation, chemotherapy, surgery. Louise was seventy-three, a widow for forty-four years, a mother for fifty-five, a smoker for fifty-eight. Her gut told her it would be much less than a year, with or without treatment. When pressed, the kind young doctor had agreed. Well. She'd lived most of her life expecting the worst. She wasn't worried about herself. She was worried about her son.

She got off the M104 bus on 102nd and Broadway, taking the deep steps carefully. She thanked the driver, checked the latch on her good handbag, and headed west to the apartment on the fifth floor where she lived alone with her son.

It was an Indian summer day. School started the next day, and the neighborhood kids ran a little wilder than usual, fighting what they knew was coming. The street was swarming with strollers,
mothers, and nannies. Dirty, gritty Broadway was getting cleaner and cleaner. When Louise and her Elia had moved into this apartment, you never saw strollers like these—fancy, with sunshades. You never saw nannies. The stores on Broadway were tiny things in a row. A dairy grocery next to a bakery next to a meat market next to a Chinese food shop. Tall apartment buildings next to five-story walk-ups. Apartment hotels with single-room occupants. Now, she could be anywhere. What difference did it make that sixteen-year-old Louise had sneaked out of her parents' house in Gravesend to join Jewish Elia on the Upper West Side? Her Catholic mother and father and her five Catholic younger brothers hadn't spoken to her again. She saw them at funerals, where her father would give her a small nod and her mother would look at her and weep. Now, her parents, Elia's parents, and Elia were all dead, her brothers moved to suburbs she'd never seen. After the war, after Elia died, she'd thought about leaving the city. But what for? Big beautiful houses with nobody there. If you wanted to take a walk, you walked with a squirrel. Everyone lived everywhere. She didn't feel one way or another about the change. It was change. What could you do?

The breeze off the river lifted the scarf on her hair. She had to go to the parlor. Her hair was a mess. She would lose her hair, she thought, closing her eyes for a minute. The breeze still smelled like summer, like heat and day-old food, sweaty children, and metal. But there were leaves on the ground already, more turning colors above her. Last winter, the movies had come to their block. Trailers and cables, people and chairs everywhere. No one famous. No one from her magazines. But the whole block, transformed out of winter. The bare limbs of trees dressed in leaves, like her mother's lacework in orange and gold.

She was glad for the red light at West End. A chance to catch her breath. She read the flyers on the light post. Lost cats, English classes, guitar lessons, roommates wanted. So much need, so many desires. She felt embarrassed reading about them.

Her son was sitting in a folding chair outside their building. He was wearing his gray sweatpants, his undershirt, a Yankees cap. Everything about him looked like it needed to be hitched up by the belt loops. The chest hairs over the top of the shirt were gray. He was a middle-aged man. She could see him the way the world saw him—a lost, sad figure. Strangers sometimes looked at him as if looking at a dog she'd assured them didn't bite. An odd mix of Italian and Italian Jew, the deck stacked against him from the beginning. It's not your fault, she wanted to tell him. Your mother loved your father, your father loved her back. A child gets to say nothing about who his parents love, for how long or in what ways.

She reached out and cupped his cheek. He leaned into it and closed his eyes like a cat.

Charlie, the boy from upstairs, was sitting next to him. In front of them, they'd spread out her comforter with the lilac print. On that, in disarray, some of her things. The wooden turtle whose shell lifted to reveal a candy dish. The Japanese glass ball Elia had brought back on his first leave. “Fishing buoys,” he'd said, unwrapping it in their living room. “Can you believe how beautiful?” he'd said.

Her nightgowns were spread out as if by a maid. Below them, her knee-highs, toes pointing out like Charlie Chaplin at rest. Over some of the nightgowns, her bras, hooked carefully, stuffed with rolled-up socks.

The sign, written on a small green chalkboard in Charlie's ten-year-old handwriting, said:
MAKE US AN OFFER WE CAN'T REFUSE
.

Michael was taken with the old Godfather movies. “We're Sicilian; they're Sicilian,” he'd tried to explain to her. “His name is Michael. My name is Michael.”

“Half Sicilian,” she always said. “Your father's family was from Ferrara.”

“
You're
Sicilian,” he would say.

Something about the movies felt vaguely insulting, and she thought that maybe watching that violence wasn't such a good idea for him, but she kept her opinions to herself. They made him happy. What did it matter what she did or didn't understand?

Here were her underclothes on the sidewalk. She sighed, scanning the items. “Sell anything?” she asked, trying to guess what might be missing.

“Lots,” Michael said. He didn't offer specifics. He unzipped the black fanny pack that was hanging from the arm of his chair and held out a handful of ones.

She waved at him. “You keep it,” she said. “You did the work.”

She could feel the cancer in her lungs. His hands were soft and smooth, nothing like the hands of the men in her family—dockworkers and laborers. His hands were like homemades she'd pressed into shape at her kitchen table.

She wouldn't tell him about the cancer. What good would it do? She'd figure out how to take care of him after she was gone. Then she'd tell him. Change made him nervous. So did loud noises and rooms that were too quiet, fancy clothes, and most grown-ups. He preferred children. He hated doctors and dentists. He hated teachers. She'd moved their living room furniture around once, and when he'd seen it, she'd had to move it back again. Before she told him anything, she wanted to have lots of information to offer.

She lowered herself to the stoop. He was whistling. She never recognized the tune. She leaned forward. “How you doing, Charlie?” she asked the boy. His hair was a rat's nest of dreadlocks. His father was black; his mother was white. They seemed happy, but what did she know?

He smiled at her. “Good, Mrs. C. And you?”

She closed her eyes. Nice boy, she thought. Polite. Too bad about the hair.

T
he mornings just after waking were the best and the worst part of the day. For a minute the little paws of cancer pressing on her chest were gone. The images of her insides eaten away hadn't yet formed. The sounds of the building and the street below were just sounds.

And then the knowledge returned in a slow march. The nice doctor. The genuine pain in his eyes. The way his fancy wristwatch had beeped and he'd ignored it. She had been glad for him then, was glad for him each morning. She imagined the cancer like a school of those yellow eating machines from the video game Michael liked to play at the Puerto Rican store on the corner.

She would lie in her bed, trying to keep the remembering from infecting everything. It seemed uninterested in her desires.

Then, slowly, the sounds of the children going to school made her nauseous. She had lost three babies after Michael, despite prayer after prayer to Saint Anne. She'd been willing to lose more, but Elia had shook his head, sad and heavy, like a horse, and put up his hand like a crossing guard.

There were the sounds of her neighbors' water rushing
through the pipes, or the heat clanging its way out of the radiators. But the sounds of Michael in the kitchen making his toast, soaking his cereal, pouring his juice terrified her. What would happen? What would happen to him?

Her whole life as a mother had been spent asking this question in one context or another.

She thought of what she could make happen. Lying there in bed, Elia's side of the bed smooth and undisturbed, she made lists in her head. She did calculations with her office-girl mind. She wrote in the air with a fingernail yellow from smoke.

There was enough money for him, a rent-controlled apartment, Elia's life insurance and army pension, her savings from years at Weinberger and Sons, Certified Public Accountants, her pension. What had they ever needed? A roof, some food, furniture built to last, a movie a week.
La miseria
, her mother had called it—a way of life that included malaria, cholera, earthquakes, volcanos, tidal waves. Louise's life was far from that.

Until a few years ago, she'd kept the money in the mattress, like her mother. But she'd finally needed to replace the mattress—it was like sleeping in a hammock—and the office girl in her had won out and she'd gone to the Apple Bank on Seventy-Fourth and Broadway to open a passbook savings account. They were giving away toasters, and she thought the red apple on their sign was festive, a sign of luck. She earned 2.2% interest and put Michael's name under hers on the account so he wouldn't have to pay taxes on it when her time came.

The mattress she'd replaced by calling 1–800-MATTRESS. One hundred dollars, removal included. The two guys looked too skinny to carry anything. She'd never seen skin as dark. Haitian,
she guessed, or the Senegalese who sold African things that smelled strange on blankets up and down Broadway. They'd noticed the slit in the mattress.

So money was not the problem. And even she knew that he could do fine on his own. Five years ago, when she'd been in the hospital for gallstones, he'd done fine without her. Maybe better. He hadn't burned the building down. He hadn't bothered the neighbors. He'd even vacuumed and cleaned the kitchen. He had said, though, that another day by himself and he'd go nuts.

So, she'd say to herself, staring at the ceiling, What is the problem then?

That's when she wept, because her mind shut down at the understanding that dying meant leaving her son. Fine, she thought of saying to the cancer. Take me. What does that have to do with him?

She'd weep for a minute and then wipe her eyes roughly. “For God's sake,” she'd say, impatient. She'd pinch lightly at her cheeks and pull back the covers to start her day.

S
he told her best friend, Muriel Yablonsky, from down the block. When their kids were young and they had a rare Saturday or Sunday off from the weekend piecework they did at home, they went to the park. Sometimes they only got as far as Louise's stoop. “Play here,” they'd say to Michael and Muriel's twin boys, handing them a piece of chalk and a rubber ball.

Now the twins were grown and living in Jersey, married to blondes Louise couldn't tell apart. Michael still had his toy wooden gun armed with rubber bands, set to discharge those square pieces of oilcloth. Now the old friends had time to sit at
Muriel's kitchen table, smoke cigarettes over cups of coffee slowly growing cold.

Before the war, when Elia thought her girl time was up, he'd send Michael to stand in front of Muriel's windows and yell for her. “Ma! Ma! Pop says come home or he'll give you something to gab about.” But Elia was the neighborhood softie, walked to his barbershop on Amsterdam Avenue at quarter of eight every morning, came home at quarter past six every night, handing out candy from his coat both ways. He tipped his hat at neighborhood women and threw pitches for the boys playing in the street. He sighed and commiserated with Mr. Kashner who owned the dairy store on the corner. He was Jewish; people thought he was wise.

When she thought about her life with him, she was astonished to realize how few years it actually covered: thirteen, 1931 to 1944, when the telegram had come. Thirteen out of seventy-three. No time at all, and space enough for a whole life. Her life with him was only part of other lives he'd had: the barbershop, the army, the woman with the Russian accent who'd shown up at the memorial service accompanied by a boy a few years younger than Michael. The boy looked like a miniature Elia. If Louise could see it, everyone else could. But no one had said a thing, then or later. Not when the boy, Nikolai, started showing up on the block, playing with the neighborhood kids, keeping his eye on her. Not when, in his twenties, money coming in from somewhere, dressed in gabardine pants and shirts with French cuffs, he started bringing them things: Prosciutt from Bleeker Street. Rolls from Ratner's. A couple of bucks for Michael. A scarf for Louise. Once, for a few months, a car he said he needed them to watch.

Being around Muriel always reminded Louise that marrying a
Jew didn't mean she was a Jew. And Italian Jew wasn't real Jew. Muriel was a real Jew. Her parents had been Socialists, her father had built row houses in Philadelphia, her mother had written letters and filled out forms for the other Jews who didn't speak English. In the seventies, Muriel had divorced her tailor husband and started dying her hair orange and wearing caftans and dangling wooden earrings. She volunteered as a reading teacher at a school in the Bronx, and invited the kids to her house and used them for her courses at Columbia. She was getting a degree in education. Louise had seen one of the experiments once. It had involved filling water glasses of different shapes to various levels and asking the kids questions about them. Muriel had seemed excited by the answers.

The kettle was whistling. Muriel let it. “Jesus Christ, Louise,” she said. “You gotta let the doctors do what they're trained to do.”

“The kettle,” Louise said. She poked through the bowl of hard candy on Muriel's table, searching for butterscotch.

Muriel poured hot water into the mugs. She was making Louise drink tea. Something herbal from that crazy health food place on Broadway. The tea strainer looked like it was filled with dirt.