The Last of the Wise Lovers (3 page)

"Go wash up and get some sleep," she
said in a tone that now sounded soft and motherly.

   "I want you to hear what I have
to say," I heard my voice magnified as it echoed off the wood paneling.

   "That'll be enough of
that," she reprimanded me again, but this time with less force.
 That's the great thing about mothers: even when you wreck their cars they
can't stay mad for long.

   "I've got a message for
you," I went over it all from the beginning, "I'm not lying, you have
to believe me."

   She didn't get mad, maybe because she
was suddenly absorbed in her trash bag.  She shook it so that the bulk of
the contents would settle, then she folded over the top of it and set it down
next to the wall.  I remember wondering: how did so much trash get into
the basement?  But I was too tired to give it much thought.

"I'm not going to move from this spot,"
I said closing my eyes, "until you've heard everything."

   It was quiet.  From behind my
lowered eyelids I could tell that she was coming up towards me.  A moment
later I felt a wet kiss on my forehead.  She smelled good, of perfume and
soap.

"All right, my baby," she said and
kissed me again, taking advantage of the fact that for the first time in years
I hadn't fled after the first kiss, "tell me what's bothering you...”

   "He said you should stop, he
said you'd know what he means, and that D-day would be the 6th of September.
 He sounded as if he'd already talked to you once before and most
important of all is: he said that...” I was afraid to open my eyes and discover
that she'd abandoned me.  "He said that if you didn't stop by the 6th
of September, they would be forced to finish somebody off on the 7th of
September, and that you, too, would get hurt."

   I opened my eyes. Her face was close
to mine and she was still smiling.

"Now you feel better, don't you?  So go
on to bed...” she got up and went back downstairs to pick up her trash bag.

"Aren't you worried?" I called after
her.

"Why should I be worried?" she answered.
"Just because of something unclear that someone who perhaps never existed
may have said?"

   *

   When I woke the next day it was
already 8:30, half an hour before I had to show up for work at the library.
 Of course, I didn't have a hope in hell.  A bus left the station
every half hour and took an hour to get to Port Authority.  Even if I
wanted to catch the next bus and get to work a bit late, who would take me to
the station now that there was no car?

   I called the library.  On the
other end of the line the woman in charge whinnied, "I hope you have a
good reason for being absent, young man."  She's about 30 years old,
but she calls me `young man' because that's what the senior librarians call
anyone under the age of 60, and she's already figured out that with her flat
chest and crooked nose she'll only make out if she takes on the special status
and the bookish air of a senior librarian.

   "I was in a car accident,"
I explained.

   She wasn't impressed. "When can
we hope to have you back with us?"

   "Tomorrow."

   But she just couldn't let up.
 "An absence of more than two days is a matter for Mr. K."
 Mr. K. is the Director of Cataloging, a little man with a delicate face
behind rimless glasses.  There was nothing authoritative or threatening
about him, but, like Dad says, you can never tell what lurks behind a benign
face.

   "I know," I said.

   "Good," she responded in
satisfaction.

   When I put the receiver down I felt
strange.  It was the first weekday morning I had spent at home in a long
time.  During the year I was at school, and in the summertime I worked at
the library without missing a single day.  Those were the conditions of
the job, to keep kids off the streets or something like that.  I got
dressed to the unfamiliar sounds of the morning and left my room.
 Yesterday's clothes were washed and dried in the hall near the basement
door.  For a moment, my heart sank.  The door to Mom's room was open.
 She was sleeping, stretched out horizontally across the bed, covered by a
blanket from head to toe.  The reading lamp was on.  A book was lying
on the rug next to an unfamiliar pair of shoes, black ones, with very high
heels and silver buckles.  Where was she out prancing in those things?
 For a minute I was surprised that it bothered me at all, but then a
minute later I was wondering how it was that I had never taken an interest in
where Mom spent her time when Dad was away on one of his trips.

   I walked on to the kitchen.  The
sink was dry, the dishes were on the rack, and the milk and rolls were slowly
spoiling out on the counter near the door.  I made myself some breakfast,
but I couldn't eat.  I threw the scraps into the garbage disposal and
pressed the button.  It responded with a faint gurgle.  Stuck.

   Taking apart broken machines calms
me.  I unscrewed the cover. The blades of the disposal cutter held a mess
of black slivers and brown paper.  I removed the cutter, cleaned them out,
and set the cutter back in place.  But something prevented it from sliding
back straight onto its base. I took the cutter out again and dug my hand deep
down the drain.

   There was something else among the
bits of garbage, something stubborn, slippery, that was stuck to the side.
 I tried to peel it off with my fingernails, and then with various objects
I stuck down the drain -- a wooden spoon, a knife -- none of which worked.
 In the end I disassembled the lower part of the garbage disposal, stuck a
bowl underneath it, and turned on the faucet.  Along with the stream of
water came flecks of brown paper, those black slivers, and this thing.

   I fished it out of the bowl with a
spoon.  It was a bit of film, a slide, actually.  It wasn't a small,
colored slide like the ones Dad used to take on trips or at family parties; it
had the dimensions of a regular photograph, and a sort of grayish-chestnut cast
that was made by a dense web of lines and letters.  It was pretty weird.
 I cleaned it off under the faucet and left it to dry on the dish rack.
 Later I brought the magnifying glass from my room, and I peered at it.

   At first all I saw was a mess of
meaningless lines.  I had to keep turning the slide in different
directions before I caught on that it was a picture of something or, to be more
precise, a diagram of a machine.  It had been reduced, but was startlingly
clear: there was a kind of disk, connected to an axle, in the midst of a lot of
pipes and valves.  Here and there, squarish letters spelled out the names
of the parts.  It wasn't possible to read them all.  I made out
"PNEUMATIC VALVE" and "EXHAUST VALVE".  On the bottom
was the word "AGITATOR".

   I examined the black slivers again.
They were made of the same stuff that the slide was made of - celluloid, as far
as I could tell.  I patched together a few of the pieces of paper.
 One of them bore the `W' of `Waldbaum's'.  It really seemed like
these were the bits of trash that Mom had stuffed into the bag the day before
in the basement, except for the fact that Mom herself was always warning me,
over and over, not to put anything that wasn't `organic' in the garbage
disposal (and her definition of `organic' meant vegetable peelings, and didn't
include any of the various objects I liked to try to grind up, like matches,
empty plastic containers, and, at the end of the school year, particularly
loathsome notebooks... ).

   I turned back to the slide, which had
dried by now.  This time I held it up to the window.  In the
right-hand corner the letters `T.S.' were printed on an angle.  On the
very bottom I could make out the tiny caption: "Agitator; diagram 1.205
out of 6.827".  The word `agitator' looked familiar - but where had I
seen it before?  I couldn't remember, nor could I imagine where the other
6.826 diagrams were or how the slide of this diagram had gotten into our garbage
disposal.

   A mere two days earlier I would
undoubtedly have thrown the slide into the wastebasket on the porch or
stubbornly tried to grind it again, but something of the strange atmosphere in
the house made me wrap it in paper and stuff it in my pocket.  As I
reassembled the parts of the garbage disposal I wondered what the slides were
for, who they belonged to, how they'd gotten into the basement where Mom could
collect them in a trash bag, and, last but not least, why she had tried to grind
them up.

   I finished putting the garbage
disposal back together and I turned it on.  Mom showed up on the spot.
 There was a look of worry on her face that vanished the minute she saw
me.  Somehow I sensed that she hadn't really calmed down, but wanted to hide
the fact that there really was cause for alarm.

"It was jammed," I pointed at the
disposal.

   She sat down at the table and leaned
her head in her hands. "Would you pour me some coffee?"

   I showed her the piece of paper with
the letter `W' on it.

  "You used the thing to grind stuff
that...”

   "A little paper won't hurt
it."

   "Was there only paper in
there?"

   "Did you find something
else?"

   The slide was in my pocket, but
something in her question made me sense that Mom was teetering on the edge of a
lie.

  "No," I mumbled, "everything
else got ground up."

   I remember chewing a roll and
thinking: what do I really know about her?  Should I take one lie to mean
that she's lied about other things, too?  Now it seemed weird: her sudden
willingness to make up, and the fact that she hadn't mentioned last night, the
wrecked car, or my broken promise to drive only to school and back.  For a
moment I weighed whether or not to try to talk to her again, but then I decided
that there was no point in it.

   Of course, you know us only too well.
 Nevertheless, I wonder what you know about how a mother and son live,
alone together in a foreign country, when the father is away from home most of
the time. In our case, there were years when there was this awesome friendship
between us, a kind of connection that grew out of the fact that each of us was
the only person the other one knew.  (Even Dad, when he was home, felt
left out.  Once he said, jokingly, of course, that Mom had birthed herself
a friend.  Another time, when they'd had a fight, he said that Mom was
ruining me by teaching me to be the man she'd dreamed of all her life.)
 Even now when the relationship between us has cooled a bit I feel a great
sense of obligation toward her, and a kind of compassion that made me realize
that morning that all her denials were her way of avoiding an even more
uncomfortable situation, in which she'd have to come right out and say,
"Don't tell your father."

   When we'd finished our coffee, I went
on ranging around the house and looking into all sorts of corners.  Mom
went off to her room, to read.  After about half an hour of restlessness,
I went in and sat down beside her.

   She picked up her head and looked at
me. "You still worried, huh?"

   I nodded.

   "I know how you feel, I know
exactly.  It happens to me, too, sometimes, that life just seems too heavy
to bear."  That's part of her charm.  When she wants to, she can
understand exactly what I'm feeling and can even put it into words.  She
took my hand. "But let's go over what actually happened: somebody got into
our car and started talking nonsense?  Maybe he was crazy, or maybe he
meant some other woman...  maybe you just
think
he said my name,
and besides how many Ford Fairmonts like ours are there in Manhattan?"

   "He followed me from
here
."

   "And how many cars like that are
there here?"

   For a moment I felt relieved, but
then I remembered something else.

 "He spoke Hebrew...”

   She was silent a moment.  This
was indeed something that could not be brushed off, just like that.

 "That still doesn't say anything,"
she said.  "How many Israelis are there in New York, half a
million?"

   "A hundred thousand.  But
it's not a matter of number, it's a matter of coincidence.  What's the
chance that a guy could get the wrong car, the wrong person, and relay a
message in Hebrew?"

  
"Not
big," she concurred, "but there
isn't
anything that I have to
stop...”

   This I couldn't answer.

   "You see?  One can see
everything in a positive light if one is only willing to devote a little
thought to it...” she stroked my head.  "I suggest that we forget the
matter and not mention it again...”

   And we didn't mention it again,
because somebody made a noise near the front door.  I looked at Mom.
 She was silent, and only the nervous twitch of her eyelid gave away the
tension she might have felt.  I went to the door.  It was only the
postman, who had dropped three envelopes through the slot.  I picked them
up and put them on her bed.  She opened the envelopes and got lost in
reading a color brochure advertising cosmetics, with a picture of a big ship on
the cover.  I went to my room and lay down on the bed, dejected.  I
started thinking again about what had happened in the Lincoln Tunnel.  The
more I tried to believe that it had all been a joke or a mistake, the harder it
was for me to convince myself.  I didn't think that Mom had lied to me
when she had denied any involvement in the whole affair, I just thought that
she was trying to protect me from something that she would deal with in her own
way.

   Mom called to me from her room.
 "Look," she said when I got there, pushing the color brochure
to the end of the bed.

"Dear Sir/Madam," it said on the front
page. "Have you ever wondered how we choose our products?"  The
logo on the envelope belonged to The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of
the Body, from which Mom purchases her facial cleanser and other stuff.