The Sunset Gang (18 page)

"Crown Heights." She paused, watching his eyes
for any sign. Then she said slowly, "And before that Brownsville."

"Brownsville. That's where I grew up. Imagine that.
What a mess that place is today. I went back once and cried like a baby."

She felt him drifting again.

"I lived on Douglass Street."

"Douglas Street? I lived on Saratoga Avenue."

"The next block."

She could sense his agitation now. Thank God, she told
herself.

"What did you say your name was?"

"Smith," she teased, knew she was teasing,
enjoying it, felt the pleasure in her body, in her soul, felt her womanliness,
the wonder of this flirtation.

"No. Your maiden name."

"Goldberg."

"My God! Frieda Goldberg!"

"Bingo."

She saw his lips tremble and his eyes mist slightly and the
remembered little tic at the base of his jawbone palpitate.

"Frieda." He had trouble swallowing.

She moved away from him on the bench, as if to study him.

"You're not
the
Heshy Feinstein?" She
brought her palms together and pushed them under her chin. "Heshy
Feinstein. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

"You can't?" He paused again, then grasped her
hands in his. "How do you think I feel?

"Frieda Goldberg." He repeated her name over and
over again.

"It's Smith now," she said.

"It's been lots of years." He moved his head up
and down, surveying her, watching her, his face flushed quite visibly beneath
the redness of his recent sunburn. She sat still, watching him, looking into
his eyes, letting him drink her in, wondering what he was seeing.

"It's a coincidence," Frieda said. A new group of
players came to take their court and they got up from the bench and moved
toward the exit.

"Let's take a walk," he said.

She seemed to be leading him. They walked along the path
that skirted the clubhouse and snaked into the pool area. There were chairs
there on which they could sit in the quiet darkness and watch the clubhouse
lights play against the surface of the pool.

"I've been counting the years in my head," he had
said after they had walked for a few moments in silence. "I'll be seventy
in December," he said. "I was seventeen."

"Fifty-two years," she said, moving close to him
in the quiet night, hoping he would take her arm.

When they reached the chairs he had wiped off the moisture
with his handkerchief. Other couples sat in the distance. She could hear their
voices.

"I've thought about us many many times," Heshy
said, his voice suddenly hoarse. He cleared his throat.

"We were something," she said, patting his hand,
and then moving her fingers up his bare arm.

"It took a long time for that to go away," he
said.

She wanted to say it never went away. She remembered Herman
again, feeling sorry. Poor Herman!

"You've had a good life?

"Fair," he said after long pause. "And
you?"

"The same."

"Tell me."

She shrugged. "As I said, I married a man named Herman
Smith. He was a cutter in the garment center, made a decent living. We lived in
two apartments. One in Crown Heights. One in Flatbush. Then he died of a heart
attack. Quick. No pain. I have a daughter named Helen, who got married and
moved to Chicago. Now I'm a widow and live in Sunset Village with the rest of
the widows." She had said it all quickly, marveling as to how swiftly it
all could be said, her life. Some life. Surely there was more to it, she told
herself. Was she deliberately trying to draw out his sympathy? Of course she
was.

"And you?" she asked. He had placed his own hand
on hers, which still rested on his bare arm.

"My father drove me crazy about that doctor business.
But he died a year or two after you moved away and I had to help my mother in
the grocery store. Then I went to City College and took my teaching tests. I
taught for more than forty years. My two children are doing fine. Ida you met.
We've been married forty-two years. Now I'm retired."

They sat silently again, his hand kneading hers now, the
pool water shimmering and the din from the clubhouse washing over the air like
distant thunder.

"We were something," he said. He is recalling me,
she thought, wondering if he was frightened. "We never could get enough of
each other."

She wanted to tell him then and there what it had meant to
her, how much of it she had protected and treasured, but she held off.

"We were very close," she said. Did it seem to
him that they were talking about different people? she wondered.

"Unbelievable," he said. "It was never the
same again."

She felt her joy now, the validation, the thing that was
alive inside of him after all those years. He bent over to catch a ray of light
on the face of his watch.

"I better pick up Ida now," he said, standing up,
but not letting go of her hand.

They walked toward the clubhouse through a clump of young
trees. He directed her off the path and looked around him quickly. Then he
enveloped her in his arms, kissing her on the lips, his tongue darting in. She
felt her body turn to jelly, lurch, and she caressed his back, running her
hands down to his buttocks. He pressed close to her with his pelvis, then
disengaged his mouth and whispered in her ear, "It's a dream."

She felt a tingle begin in her, somewhere deep, a tremor of
pleasure, something she had not felt for more than fifty years. She wondered if
he was still alive there, still needed her, and she brought her hand down to
his crotch, stroking gently. She felt the beginning of hardness and knew she
was giving him pleasure, but he moved away swiftly. They had heard footsteps
coming on the cement path.

"Are you going to mention this to Ida?" she asked
as they reached another dark spot on the path. This time they paused but did
not touch.

"No," he said.

"Good."

They started to move toward the clubhouse, but she
hesitated.

"I'm going home from here."

"Will I see you again?"

"Of course."

She was so agitated she could not sleep, tossing and
turning in her bed. The restraints of more than five decades had simply
crumbled against the force of this mysterious attraction. She did allow herself
the use of the word mystery, since it was something that defied all logic--at
least from her experience.

In the morning, she was tempted to call her daughter,
because she dared not confide in any of her friends, especially Minnie, who
would have the information all over Sunset Village as if on a streamer carried
by an airplane. She was uneasy, too, about their having been seen in public
together. Did someone see them last night? It was not exactly the norm to see
two people embracing in the shadow of the Sunset Village Clubhouse. What she
had felt unmistakably was something that Herman Smith, for all his kindness and
faithfulness and decency, could not produce in her and for this inability had
suffered a lifetime of deprivation and frustration.

When she had gotten out of bed that morning, she had taken off
her nightgown and viewed herself again in the full-length mirror, inspecting
every fold of her aging body, wondering whether, when compared to that image in
his mind of a sixteen-year-old, it would disgust him, turn him away from her.
If I close my eyes, she reasoned, I feel sixteen. Perhaps he will close his.
And I will close mine, she agreed, although she had noticed that men's bodies
did not seem to shatter so terribly with age.

When the telephone rang, she knew it was him and answered
quickly.

"Frieda?"

"Yes."

"Heshy."

"I know."

"You knew I would call?"

"I felt it."

"I didn't sleep all night. Ida got up twice to get me
an Alka Seltzer. Frieda, I can't believe it. What I feel. What I felt last
night."

"Yes," she said. She knew, of course, why he had
called and pondered the question. They must be very careful. Surely, this one
time, she told herself.

"You can come over. Walk in the back." She gave
him her address.

"I can stay till two-thirty. Ida is at the pool."

"Yes," she said.

When he had hung up, she called Minnie.

"I don't know what's wrong. I feel terrible. I'm going
to nap."

"Should I come over later?"

"No. I'll be fine. Just let me sleep."

"Your friend Ida Feinstein is terrific," Minnie
said. "She fits in most beautifully with our group. Her husband sounds
like a big schlepp."

"At least he's alive." It was an expected
reference, a wisecrack.

"That's something."

She put on a brassiere to take away the sag of her breasts
and she searched her drawer for a fresh pair of pink panties, the older kind without
elastic around the legs. She found a pair lying on the bottom of her lingerie
drawer and drew it on. She then slipped into a flowered dressing gown. She went
into the kitchen, made a tuna-fish salad, enough for two, and set it out on the
cocktail table in front of the couch. For a moment she wondered if she should
put out her half bottle of Manischewitz Concord, but remembering its cloying
sweetness she rejected the idea.

The rattling on the screen door came sooner than she
expected, and she was annoyed with herself for not having lifted the latch
because someone might see him knocking on the door. Walking swiftly to the
door, she let him in. He was wearing a flowered short-sleeved shirt, white
cotton slacks, and white loafers. She led him through the apartment to the
living room and they sat on the couch together.

"I can't think of anything else since I met you last
night, Frieda. I've been going over in my head all the things we did together.
What we meant to each other. I never thought I would see you again,
never."

"Vice versa," she responded. She moved closer to
him and he put a hand on her knee.

"You think we're a joke?" he asked suddenly. It
has been troubling him, she saw, but the feeling between them was beyond his
stopping it. It had always been beyond that.

"I was going to call my daughter this morning and tell
her."

"She knows about us?"

"Not really. Once I mentioned it when Herman died. But
if I called her up and said, 'Helen, I met an old boy friend and I'm going to
have an affair,' she would plotz right then and there."

"How could I even tell my children? Certainly not Ida.
I've never been unfaithful to Ida. Not once. What about you?"

"Not only was I not unfaithful. I wasn't even
faithful."

He threw his head back and laughed, rubbing his hand up and
down her inner thigh.

"I made some tuna-fish salad," she said stupidly,
feeling the blood surge in her veins, the joy tickling her groin.

"There is only one salad I want," he said.

She felt her breath coming in hot gasps as she moved her
head back on his shoulder, knowing her mouth was open as she made gurgling
sounds. She recovered herself somewhat to begin unzipping his pants.

"You haven't got a bad heart, have you, Heshy?"

He looked down at her confused, then smiled as he helped
her remove his white slacks and undershorts.

"You want to go into the bedroom?" she asked,
hoping he would say no, since they had never ever been together in a bedroom.

He shook his head.

"I'm older now," he said, surveying his still
not-up-to-par member, "I need more help than I used to." He seemed to
be pleading. She stood up and unfastened her brassiere. She let his hands play
with her nipples while she stroked his manhood, feeling the response come, the
hardness begin.

"You're marvelous, Frieda," he said. "It's
been a long, long time."

"Close your eyes," she said. He did as instructed
and she removed her panties and dressing gown and lay under him bringing his
member into her body. She also kept her eyes closed. "I am sixteen,"
she said, moving under him, her fingers instructive, feathery. Poor Herman, she
thought, not to have known this. The pleasure began at the roots of her hair
and moved downward until she twitched inside. It was like warm honey rolling
over her in wave upon wave. She shuddered and felt him shudder and when the
feeling had passed, she remembered how it had been and how they had worried
about her becoming pregnant.

Soon after, they dressed and had lunch and then she watched
him become drowsy.

"You want to take a nap?"

He nodded and she led him to the bedroom, where they hung
their clothes on a chair like an old married couple and got in between the
sheets. She set the alarm clock and cuddled close to him. In a moment he was
asleep, snoring softly.

Watching his eyes twitch and the little hairs in his nose,
she softly lifted the covers and looked at his seventy-year-old body, soft and
bulgy. His penis, however, looked as she had remembered it, although, below,
the bags seemed older, more wrinkled. She crawled down and gently kissed the
head of this instrument of her pleasure. He stirred for a moment, then
continued to snore.

It had not mattered after all, she thought, her going away.
He never did become a doctor and all his father's dreams went into the grave
with him. She would not allow herself to imagine how it might have been if they
had married and had children and spent the last fifty-two years together. That
would be self-pity, something that she had warned her daughter to beware of.
Never feel sorry for yourself. For a moment while she was on the couch, feeling
her pleasure coming, her eyes tightly shut, she could imagine herself sixteen
again, with all its possibilities. It was the one memory that had never
withered, had withstood time, had been able to be recalled at will and now, by
some miracle, relived.

The alarm crackled in the room. She clicked it off and the
hum of the air-conditioning unit resumed. He opened his eyes, smiled, and
burrowed his head between her large breasts.