Love Begins in Winter (6 page)

Then Hannah let her kite go.

It quickly rose, twisting brilliantly against the climbing sun.

Allez
, I thought.

And my fingers released the strings of my own kite.

The force we had held fast against our bodies abruptly ceased.

The kites tore through the heavens. They were soon nothing more than two specks of color. And then both disappeared from our sight. Even though we knew they were out there, there was no way to ever bring them back.

Six months later I played for one night only in Paris. Instead of staying at the hotel, I rented a car and drove home to Noyant. I arrived about six o'clock in the morning. There were birds everywhere and the roads were empty. I sat with the baker in his small cake shop. I told him the whole story of how I collided with Hannah at a hotel in California. I wanted to explain why I hadn't been in touch for several months and also to confess how happiness still felt remote—as though I were watching it happen to someone else. It was a cool morning. Children trudged to school, not completely awake. The sky outside was rubbed gray. Clouds passed like open hands. The sky would soon be full of falling drops. The baker sat with me and dried his hands on his apron. His wife joined him from the back. I could smell fresh mushrooms. The radio was on.

The baker gathered my hands in his and told me how glad he was I hadn't been in touch—and that I must promise to stop sending stones. I suddenly felt very selfish and vain. I shrank from him. I pulled my hands away.

But then he said: “Bruno—we lost a daughter—we don't want to lose a son.”

“That is what you would have been to us,” his wife said.

“That is what you have become to us,” the baker said and took his wife's hand.

“Send postcards from now on,” he said. “No more stones, eh?”

Before I went to see my parents, the baker's wife suggested that when Hannah comes to France, perhaps I might introduce them to her. Perhaps they might make her a cake and serve it to her in the shop with a bowl of steaming coffee—that we might just be four people sitting down to a small meal in the evening.

A
LMOST A YEAR AFTER
I met Hannah, the birdman died. His obituary was one of the longest ever printed in the
Los Angeles Times
. His life was unlike any of the rumors. There was a candlelight vigil in the park attended by thousands of people. Instead of birds, there were helicopters.

But I was far away in the middle of France, back in Noyant at the shop eating cakes with an old man and his wife. Children peered in at us through misty windows. They rubbed their mittens on the glass and talked loudly. They were excited because it was the first afternoon that bicycles would be sold against the church wall.

It was snowing hard. The baker was very round and his apron fit snugly about his middle. He went into the kitchen and then quickly reappeared with a tray of pastry scraps. The children saw him coming and stood by the door. Then we saw arms reaching for the tray and heard a chorus of “
Merci, Monsieur
.” When he came back in, there were snowflakes on his shoulders.

“They expect it now.” He shrugged. “I've been feeding them since they were the size of baguettes.”

The baker's wife laughed.

“They call him the children's baker,” she said.

The baker went behind the counter and poured himself a small glass of brandy.

He looked at Hannah for a long time.

Then he walked over and kissed the top of her head.

The baker's wife stared out through the window—at the world that lay beyond it and the mysterious place beyond that.

When it started to get dark, Hannah and I left the shop. Bicycles were being wheeled home in the snow. Old women left bricks of cake on one another's doorsteps. The butcher was dressed up like Santa Claus.

Children peered out into the night from upstairs windows. And for several kilometers Hannah and I waded through snowy fields, past old gates and fallen trees, laughing and calling out as our bodies disappeared from view.

The shadows remained.

Gifts from the fallen, not lessening our happiness but guiding it, deepening it, and filling us with the passion we would need to sustain our love in the coming days.

A gentle reminder that what we have is already lost.

W
HEN
I
FIRST SAW
Jennifer, I thought she was dead. She was lying facedown on the couch. The curtains were not drawn. Her naked body soaked up the falling moonlight and her back glowed.

Jennifer was Brian's mother. When he frantically turned her over, she moaned. Then her arm flew back, viciously but at nothing. Brian told me to call 911, but Jennifer screamed at him not to. Brian switched on a lamp. He kept his distance and said, “Mom, Mom.” Then he asked where Dad was. She moaned again. Neither of us knew what to do.

Brian fetched a bathrobe and laid it across her back. She sat up, then pulled it around herself weakly. The robe was too big and gaped in several places. One of her breasts was visible. I know Brian could see it. It was like an old ashen bird. I made coffee without asking. There was cake in the refrigerator. It said “Tate's Bakery” on the box. I cut the string. With the same knife I cut three equal pieces. We ate and drank in silence. Jennifer swallowed each forkful quietly; my yoga instructor would have called her mindful. She shook her head from side to side. Then Brian and I watched as Jennifer buried her face in her hands as though she were watching a slide show of her life projected across her palms.

On the carpet next to Jennifer's clothes were several brochures for new cars. There was also a wedding band and a glass of something that had been knocked over. The contents of the glass had dried into the carpet and looked like a map of Italy.

We sat in silence; a forced intimacy, like three strangers sheltering under a doorway in pouring rain.

I remembered a childhood dream that went like this: The night before something exciting, such as going on vacation or a birthday party, I would dream of accidentally sleeping through the whole thing. In the dream I would believe I had missed everything—that the event was over; it had taken place without me.

Brian and I had been together for eighteen months when his parents decided they wanted to meet me. I was indifferent. I was thirty-four and settled in a practice with several other doctors. I didn't care about living up to their expectations. I got tired of all that after I entered medical school and started clumsily slicing my way through cadavers. I come into contact with life and death on a daily basis, but not through ailing retirees battling heart disease and lamenting their crumbling bones but through children, who are never to blame for anything that happens to them. I wanted to be a pediatrician from the start.

Countless children have waited outside my office with my secretary, Lauren, a southern redhead with flawless skin. I explain to parents the problem, the procedure, and the risk—in that order. The lone parent never cries, but couples do, even if the prognosis is positive. As they console one another, I often think of the little head swiveling around the waiting room, reading a book about boats, or looking at a plant, or staring at Lauren, unaware of the long and often arduous journey that some force in the universe has chosen for them.

It doesn't do children any good to see their parents upset, and so I sometimes let the child take Lauren out for ice cream.

Several years ago, Brian's parents bought a summerhouse in Hampton Bays. I personally don't like Long Island. It's overpopulated and people find safety through excess. The goal of life seems to revolve around ownership and luxury—just as it did for the English four hundred years ago. It's everything my parents were against in the 1960s. Either America has changed significantly in the last decade or overeducation has left me cynical. So many revere a vehicle like the Hummer and other glorified farm equipment while spending their lives in ignorance of how their own organs work. We plead with God to spare us from disease, while consciously filling our bodies with toxins.

I don't much like the Hamptons either. In the years I have been going out there, it's become a police state—and the police are paid handsomely for what amounts to guarding the estates of a few homegrown aristocrats.

Perhaps you wouldn't think my views extreme if I explained that my parents are from Oregon. I grew up wandering misty fields and sketching cows. My mother knitted clothes and my father built my one and only dollhouse in his workshop. My town is staunchly Democratic and well known as a haven for lesbians—imagine coffee shops and furniture stores run by tattooed women who bake upside-down cake for one another.

They both visited once. My mother feels abandoned by me, her only child. But then she was always strange—somehow detached at key moments. When I was in high school, I put it down to menopause, but now I think it's something that's been long-standing since childhood. My father would never say anything critical to her—he would just rub his chin or rub her hand. My father spent his life rubbing things, like Aladdin.

Of course, my parents didn't understand the Hamptons when they visited, the summer before I met Brian. Especially my father, who became flustered when we were stopped at a beach checkpoint and told we had to pay the town a fee in order to park at the ocean. My father told the teenage attendant that the Town of Southampton was no better than the mafia. But then people behind us started honking. Over dinner at a lobster shack close to where the fishing boats dock, my father said we would have been better off under the British. My mother said that if the British had retained the colonies, the only difference would be that everyone would have bad teeth. The waitress overheard and laughed. She gave my father a beer on the house and told him to cheer up.

On the way back to the city my father looked strangely sad. I think he was going through something painful that he couldn't talk to my mother about. I wish I'd asked. He died last year.

After that long visit, the novelty of upper-middle-class New York life wore off and I appreciated the city for what it was, an indifferent, throbbing pulse with an infinite number of chances to reinvent yourself.

It was sweet of Alan and Jennifer, Brian's parents, to say I was the first of their son's girlfriends to be asked out to their summerhouse in Hampton Bays. But they quickly ruined it by saying they only wanted to meet the ones he was serious about—as though the less serious ones were meaningless. Alan and Jennifer referred often to their summerhouse when they left messages on Brian's machine, which led me to suspect they'd grown up poor. Actually they hadn't. Jennifer was the daughter of a real estate husband-and-wife team from Garden City. Alan was the son of a Jewish tailor from the Lower East Side who knew how to save money and collect secrets while he measured in-seams. Brian said his grandfather's knowledge of clients' personal lives helped get Alan into a private school where Jews were not particularly welcomed. When Alan's father died, his few remaining clients on Park Avenue breathed a sigh of relief.

Brian has a younger sister, Martha. I met her once at a concert in Irving Plaza. Perhaps because she isn't pretty, she had decided to be ironic and make her body the canvas for a series of strange tattoos, one of which is an artichoke.

Brian's mother, Jennifer, was once physically beautiful. In the photographs which dotted the living room of their Hampton Bays summer home, she looked perpetually overjoyed—her mouth painted and open like a rose moving its petals.

The night Brian and I arrived in Hampton Bays we kissed in the car before going in. It's something we do. We are always kissing. Brian stopped abruptly when he suddenly noticed the house was in darkness.

“That's strange,” Brian said. “There are no lights on.” I sensed something was terribly wrong.

Jennifer's eyes were so puffy I felt awkward looking at her. I quietly asked Brian if he wanted me to examine them. He said they always puffed up when she was upset, but he'd never seen them like this.

Alan, Jennifer's husband, had walked out that afternoon. He returned from his tennis match and started packing a suitcase. A woman in a convertible picked him up. She waited at the end of the driveway with the engine turning over. He said he wasn't coming back. He said Ken, their lawyer, would sort out the arrangements. Jennifer chased after the car and threw her shoes at it. Then she walked home. They had been married for thirty-four years. They were married the year I was born.

Brian's father was fifty-seven years old when he left Jennifer. Alan's father, the Jewish tailor, was fifty-seven when he died of a coronary thrombosis. It was a psychoanalytical cliché, but I kept quiet and said nothing to Brian—even intelligent people go nuts around their parents.

I asked Brian again if he wanted me to examine his mother and he said no—that they had a close family friend, a Dr. Felixson, that his mother trusted and who was at his summerhouse in Southampton. I couldn't hide my disappointment. “Let's just get through tonight,” he said. “You should meet this guy anyway—he wrote a book back in the seventies on pediatrics or something.”

“Really,” I said.

As I waited outside in the darkness for the doctor, Brian came out with a copy of Dr. Felixson's book,
The Silence After Childhood
. It was an odd title. I said I would read it. Then Brian told me he'd known about his father's affair. Apparently, Alan had confessed over dinner several months ago. Jennifer had been visiting her family in Florida. Brian thought I would be angry with him for not telling me. But I wasn't.

“What man could resist the opportunity to live twice?” Brian said his father had pleaded. He perceived his son's silence as reluctant approval, but in truth, Brian was disappointed. He finally had to admit his father's cowardice. The marriage to his mother had never been harmonious, but he'd stayed in it. Brian said that if his father wasn't such a coward, he would have hurt Jennifer thirty years ago, instead of hurting her
and
humiliating her after three wasted decades.

“But then Martha wouldn't have been born,” I said. Brian was silent for a moment. I thought he was mad at me, but then he said that regardless of his sister, his father had stolen his mother's life.

“But Jennifer let him steal it,” I added.

Brian nodded. I think he appreciated my frankness, but I shouldn't have said it then.

The doctor arrived in an old station wagon. A kayak was tied on the roof. He got out and waved. Then he opened the trunk and reached for his bag.

He was a tall, thin man who looked as though he could have been a nineteenth-century Midwestern farmer. His unkempt white hair and strange side-to-side walk gave him the appearance of being drunk. He was born and raised in Stockholm. He'd moved to New York in the 1970s. He wasn't married.

“Brian, my boy, sorry to see you under these circumstances, but we'll sort this out together,” Dr. Felixson said quietly. He walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Then he said, “What madness has driven you to retrieve a copy of that book you're holding?”

Before disappearing inside, he turned around and said, “Brian tells me you both went to Stockholm, yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was beautiful, but it didn't snow.”

“Times change, I suppose,” he said.

One night, maybe our third date. Brian and I lying in bed. The room sketched by moonlight. The street outside in a deep sleep. Snowing and we didn't even know.

Brian said he and his sister had trembled with fear at his parents' arguments. “They screeched like birds,” he said.

Brian said he would never get married. I hesitated. Years of adolescent sleepovers had engraved images of the perfect day. In truth, I hadn't thought about marriage for years.

Brian sensed my fear. He reached for my hand under the blanket. I gave it to him. He was no coward—maybe that was worth a thousand perfect wedding days.

Brian believed that marriage often gives one party the license to behave intolerably without the fear of being abandoned because the state must oversee any separation. He said that with many couples he knew, either the husband or the wife had waited until they were married to really hang out their dirty washing. He believed that marriage was an outdated concept, like circumcision in gentiles.

“But not in Jews?” I said.

“It's more complicated than that,” he said, but in a kind way, as if to say I had a point too.

The next day we went to McCarren Park and built a snowman. A young Hispanic boy helped us with the finishing touches. The boy held my hand for a while. Then he said Brian and I should get married. Brian looked at me and laughed, then asked him if he'd settle for a cup of hot chocolate at the Greenpoint Café. The boy said he would. I had wanted Brian all to myself but loved how he was so inclusive. I suggested the boy call his mother and tell her where he was. I gave him my cell phone. Later that night, I noticed there was no new number on my call list. The boy had just held the phone to his ear and talked.

That was one of the nicest days I've ever had with anyone. Later we went to a fondue restaurant and then stayed up all night drinking and listening to Getz and Gilberto. I remember dancing. Brian watched.

A week later when the snow melted, we decided to go to Sweden for a long weekend. It cost more than we thought because you forget to include things like car service to the airport and then the money you happily waste in duty-free. We were both in graduate school, so it took us a year to pay the trip off. I remember we held hands on the flight. You can't put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can't have one without the other.

Dr. Felixson examined Jennifer in private. We heard her crying. Then we heard Dr. Felixson's voice. It sounded like he was talking to Brian's father on the phone. Before he left, he said that we should call him if we had any questions and that, with any luck, we'd all live through this. I was too tired to get one of my cards from the car, and so I said I would send him an e-mail. Of course, I never did.

Soon after Dr. Felixson left the house, his sedative began to pull Jennifer out to sleep like a tug silently towing a ship out to sea. She mumbled that if Alan showed up or called back, to tell him she was dead. I nodded.