Goodbye Without Leaving (23 page)

I did not see him for a week. Then he appeared late one morning when Gertje, Bernard and Buddy were at a meeting and Dr. Frechtvogel had gone off to lunch with Mrs. Eva Muller.

“No one's here,” I said.

“You're here,” he said.

“I mean, no one you want to see.”

“I want to see
you
,” he said. “I'd like to take you out to lunch to thank you for all that work.”

“Oh, that's okay,” I said.

I found that I was having a hard time looking at him.

“I mean it,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll just put the answering machine on. But you'll have to have lunch near my son's school. Is that all right?”

“How nice that you have a child,” Leo said.

We took a cab to the Coffee Bean. In the taxi, we did not say a word.

We did not say very much while we looked at the menu. Once our order was taken, I felt a little desperate.

“What did you do before you worked for the Regensteins?” Leo asked.

“I had a baby,” I said.

“And before that?”

“Well, I worked for this foundation that preserved Afro-American music, and before that I used to be a rock and roll performer.”

“Oh, really,” said Leo.

“Yup,” I said. “I used to sing with Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. You probably never heard of them. You were probably off somewhere listening to the Brahms string quartets.”

“‘Shake and Boogie,'” said Leo. “‘Love Me All Night Long.' I'm a man of my generation. Did you sing those?”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“How fascinating,” Leo said.

“I have nothing to show for it,” I said.

“Oh,” Leo said. “Are you supposed to have something to show for things?”

“Well, of course,” I said. “My God. You have the experience of going to college and you get a degree and then you use the degree to do something. You have the experience of being pregnant and you get a baby. I mean, I just have the memory of the experience.”

“I heard you singing ‘The Tennessee Waltz.'” said Leo. “You can still sing, after all.”

“Those days are over. Nothing came of it,” I said. “I mean, people who really
do
things have professions, and vocations. Maybe I'm one of those meandering types and being in the music business was a form of meandering.”

“Meandering types are often very interesting to know,” Leo said.

All at once I looked him in the eye. Did this mean he wanted to know me?

“Maybe some are,” I said. I realized that it was costing me a great deal of effort not to grab his hands.

We drank our coffee. Then I said, “Did you go to the Peter Pan Nursery?”

He put his cup down and smiled. His eyes were a very dark brown but, when I looked at them closely, I could see varying shades in them, like the rings of trees.

“I went to the Kaiser Wilhelmschule,” Leo said. “But every day I had tea with two old British ladies who taught me English. When I came to this country I wore an Eton suit and spoke with a British accent, and the other little boys beat me up.”

I thought of Little Franklin. What sorrows would
my
little darling have to face?

“Now that I work at the Regensteins',” I said, “I feel totally amorphous. Gertje talks about what America is like to Europeans, but I don't quite identify with what she describes. In some ways, nothing ever
happens
in America. It's like a sponge. I feel as if I have no qualities whatsoever.”

“Really?” Leo said, smiling. “No qualities whatsoever?”

“I'm a fabulous driver,” I said.

A few weeks later, I lied to Johnny about where I was going. I went to Leo's apartment on the pretext of borrowing a book and shortly thereafter I went to bed with him.

52

It was snowing when I left my nice warm apartment, my nice warm husband, my sleeping child. I had made a meatloaf for supper. The dishes were washed, the laundry was done, folded and stacked on the dining room table. Little Franklin had been fed his supper, bathed, settled into bed in his striped pajamas, read to and kissed good-night. Johnny sat at his desk in a corner of the living room going through a pile of papers. I left the house without a pang.

I said I was going to the movies with Mary, a safe lie since she was on a retreat at her monastery. Without my boy, without a bag full of crackers and Mickey Mouse statuettes and little boxes of grape juice with straws attached, and extra mittens, to say nothing of the battered elephant I was required to carry with me when accompanied by my son, I felt totally unlike myself: light, unanchored, an unidentifiable person on the subway.

I had arranged with Leo that I would stop by on my way to visit my friend Mary Abbott, who lived in his neighborhood. I was going to borrow a book called
Kindervater's Vienna
, the English edition of which we did not have at the office. As far as I could tell, Leo thought I was a nice, ordinary, married person with a child.

I felt I was being compelled toward him. I felt I would die if he did not kiss me. It had nothing to do with Johnny or Franklin; it had to do with me. Just for a minute, I said to myself, I want to be in Leo's arms. Then I will somehow be fortified and can go on with the rest of my life. I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it.

I was the innocent American, making trouble right and left—a microcosm of imperialism, except that I only sought to colonize a tiny portion of Old Europe. A small, green elevator took me to the sixth floor. I rang his doorbell and in a minute we were face to face.

“Hi!” I said, in a bright, rattled way.

“Come in,” said Leo. “Take your coat off. There's snow all over you.”

I took my coat off and threw it over a chair in his hallway.

“I'm sorry to look so grubby,” I said.

“You don't look grubby,” Leo said. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Oh, yes!” I said, feeling that the voice of some jaunty, moronic member of the Junior League had entered my body.

His living room looked disorganized and rich, like a room in a domestic Victorian painting: an old couch covered with a paisley shawl, lamps with the kind of heavy paper shades that throw off yellow light. These things, he told me, were found by his flea-marketing mother and given to him. Two walls were covered in books.

I followed him into the kitchen, a small, functional space, and saw that he had one of those old enamel French coffeepots with a top that looks like a pagoda. In his kitchen he looked slightly over-lifesized. A person could have just thrown her arms around him from the back while he filled the kettle. I felt that if I opened the cupboards, which I longed to do, I would find a jumble of exotic things I had never seen before, but when Leo himself opened a door, all I saw was peanut butter, Rice Krispies and grape jelly.

On a tray he put two cups, a teapot and a plate of wafers he took from an ornamental tin. “They're Carlsbad
Oblaten
,” Leo said. “My mother makes sure I always have some around.”

I looked at him with longing.

“Food of my childhood,” he said. “Come into my study.”

At the end of another small hallway were two rooms separated by a bathroom. One was a bedroom—I could see the bed and a bureau. The other was his study, with a desk, a reading chair and an ottoman. The walls were covered with bookshelves and his desk was covered with papers. The reading lamp had a paper shade too, which made me feel that I was sitting in the middle of a pool of yellow light.

Leo poured the tea and I stared at his large, strong-looking hands.

“When I was a little boy,” he was saying, “my mother used to take me to Kleine Café every Thursday afternoon after school. I guess I must have been about eight, because I had already turned into an American boy. I wore blue jeans and Keds and played baseball instead of soccer. I sort of looked forward to it and dreaded it, too. There would be all her friends, sitting and drinking their coffee and eating those little cakes with the decorations on them. I wanted to go home and eat Oreo cookies like my friends, but my mother had no idea what they were. I knew I was being a good boy since it meant so much to her to have this weekly outing, and I hated her for it, too.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You have a little boy,” Leo said. “Ludwig mentioned what a wonderful child he is.”

“Yes,” I said. “He's the most wonderful person I have ever known.”

“It's nice to be from the same place as your child,” said Leo. “Look at Gertje and Buddy. She's totally devoted to him, and he totally baffles her. All that European culture and what does she get! A rampaging American capitalist.”

As I drank my tea, a feeling of desolation overcame me. I had not had the opportunity to feel this way for some time. It was a way I had tried not to feel on tour, or up at the Race Music Foundation, or out in social life with Johnny. I was everywhere under false pretenses. I had no rock to stand on.

“And do you find it strange to work around so many Jews?” Leo was asking me.

“I am Jewish,” I said.

“Really,” Leo said. “I wouldn't have known that.”

“Well, I am,” I said. “In fact, I'm looking for a synagogue. I need to be educated. I mean, I've never known anyone who knows as little about things as I do.”

“But you're a wonderful driver,” said Leo, smiling.

“I'm a red-blooded American girl,” I said. “I drive like a dream and swim like a fish. I know the words to every rock and roll song in a ten-year period. When our baby was little, the first song he ever learned was ‘Rockin' Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.'”

“Sounds good to me,” said Leo.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I mean, it's nice for a kid to know the words to ‘Camptown Races' and ‘Shoofly Pie and Apple Pandowdy,' but, you know, where is the larger picture?”

“Are babies interested in the larger picture?” Leo said.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“I do, but here's what I mean. My mother sang me all the songs she knew as a child. When I came here, America was something to
learn
. If I had known you as a child, I would probably have wanted to be just like you.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I have too many horrible qualities.”

“That may well be,” Leo said. “But you don't know how romantic you red-blooded Americans are to us Europeans.”

At that moment I wanted to hurl myself into his arms.

“I am here under false pretenses,” I said.

“Oh?”

I took a deep breath. I felt actually rather sick.

“I'm a very bad person,” I said. “I wanted to kiss you.”

“People often want to kiss people,” Leo said.

“Yes, but I'm a wife and mother.”

“Wives and mothers often want to kiss people,” Leo said.

“If you kissed me, would it be because you feel sorry for me?”

Leo gave me a puzzled look. “It would be because I wanted to kiss you,” he said. “I assume that you are going off to see your friend who lives in my neighborhood.”

“That was a pretense,” I said.

“Actually,” Leo said, “we ought to think about this a little. Naturally, I'd love to kiss you, but then what?”

“You have a girlfriend,” I said.

“I have a woman I have been seeing for a few years.”

“Are you going to marry her?” I said.

“I'm not going to marry anyone for a long time,” Leo said. “I'm going to spend a few years in Europe before I get married.”

“You know,” I said, “I think I should put on my hat and coat and get out of here.” I stood up. He stood up too. The yellow light in his study threw a soft shadow over him. The top of my head grazed his chin. That half darkness seemed to keep us pinned to our places. We didn't speak: we breathed at one another. We moved like people under water. The tiniest gesture brought us closer.

He kissed me and kissed me. We kissed any number of times, and then we walked the few paces out of his study and across the hallway to his bedroom. I felt as if I were on fire.

When we connected, I felt a deep, inward shiver. This was not like sex for having fun or having children. It did not seem to be about falling in love, or even about having a sexual encounter, but about some ancient, primitive longing desperate to be fulfilled. Leo was more like a destination than a person. Being near him gave me access to something I needed to know.

We lay in bed and watched the big, lazy flakes spiraling down.

“We better see if it's sticking,” Leo said.

“It's melting,” I said. “I won't have any problems getting home.”

“When the time comes, I'll drive you,” Leo said.

I got into bed next to him. “I'm freezing,” I said.

He warmed me up, and then he smoked a cigarette and put the ashtray on the bed between us.

“Tell me why you think you don't know anything,” Leo said.

“I don't,” I said. “Nothing that I know sticks together. Rock and roll. Victorian novels. How to drive. I know I'm Jewish and I wouldn't know how to give a proper Seder if my life depended on it.”

“There are books devoted to that subject,” Leo said.

“You don't understand,” I said. “I don't want to be the sort of person who learns about a Seder from books. I want to be the sort of person who knows these things by heart.”

“So this isn't about knowing. It's about being.”

“It's about knowing and being as the same thing,” I said. “There isn't anything
to
being an American. You don't even have to know American history. I mean,
you
know things. You're from Western Civ.”

Leo put out his cigarette. “Hush,” he said. He put his arms around me. “You have no idea,” he said. He kissed my neck and whispered in my ear. “Oh, my America,” he said. “My newfound land.”