You Are My Heart and Other Stories (13 page)

“Closure?” She cocked her head to the side. “Possibly. But as soon as I mailed the letter, I realized the obvious—that what I wanted resembled overture much more than closure.”

“Well, here we are,” he said. “So that some wishes, it seems—even when unacknowledged—do come true.”

“The unconscious never sleeps,” she said.

“A good, if sometimes troubling fact,” he said. “But I can't accept the check,” he added quickly. “In fact, I've already torn it up.”

“You shouldn't have.”

“For starters, I remember giving you three hundred fifty dollars in small bills to give to the doctor. The check you wrote was for more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“For starters—” she glanced at a waiter who was standing beside their table “—for starters, I'll have a dry Martini, two olives, no twist.”

“The same,” Paul said.

She smiled easily, leaned toward him. “I remember the first time I ordered a dry Martini, and you told me that E. B. White claimed it was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”

“That was H. L. Mencken,” Paul said. “White called it ‘the elixir of quietude.' ”

She sat up straight. “The amount,” she stated, “represented interest on three hundred and fifty dollars compounded quarterly at five percent for forty-one years.”

“That's ridiculous, and you know it,” he said.

“But it served to compound your guilt enough for you to agree to meet with me.”

“It wasn't the check that brought me here,” he said. “As far as I can tell, I feel no guilt now, and never did.”

“
None?
”

“I've always thought that what we did—what you went through—set us
both
free,” he said, and, having anticipated her reaction to his having torn up the check, he continued to speak words he had prepared in advance: “I felt for your pain, of course, if that's the right word—for the
ordeal
you endured,
which was surely unpleasant, and, as I recall, made you feel dirty and ashamed—”

“ ‘ Sinful' would be the apt word,” she interjected, “given that until the age of eighteen, I was taught by nuns.”

“Sinful then,” Paul said. “And there were all the lies and secrecy, the man asking for a kiss when it was over…”

“Well, some things are better now than they were then. Young people have more options these days, wouldn't you say? They don't have to sneak around the way we did.”

“Still bitter, aren't you? I never
insisted
, you know. I—”

“Bitter? Not at all,” she said. “Actually, it pleases me that you remember details—the amount, the doctor's gentle perversity—you reacted with such cold logic at the time—such
rationality—
that—”

“Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, I was not unfeeling, then or now. What was our alternative? To bring an unwanted child into the world who would have been resented, and who—”

Confused momentarily to hear himself rehearsing old arguments, he stopped.

“We don't know that,” she said. “When it comes to such matters, we have no double-blind study. As you were fond of saying, we're not living in a first draft. This—our lives now—is it, yes?”

She paused, but he said nothing.

“For my part,” she continued, “I think I would have loved the child, and you would have too. It's what I believed at the time, though I lacked the courage to say so—and I believed we might have been happy together. Who knows?”

“Nobody.”

Their drinks came, and she raised her glass. “To us,” she said.

They drank, looked at their menus, ordered lunch—crab cakes for her, grilled seafood salad for him. They talked easily while they ate, telling each other about the years between, and about their apartments, their jobs, their children. He was in semiretirement,
teaching one seminar a semester, but—the good news—would be permitted to remain in his faculty apartment on Claremont Avenue for the rest of his life; she had bought a two-bedroom co-op on Fifth Avenue at Sixty-Ninth Street, and was working three days a week for Quinn and Janovsky, whose senior partners were men with whom she'd gone to law school. His son and daughter, both married, lived in Brooklyn, and each had two children. All three of her children—two girls and a boy—lived in and around Weston, Connecticut, near to where they had grown up.

Few things in life made her happier than to know that her children were close, she said, and not just geographically. They actually
liked
one another, and this allowed her to believe that perhaps she had gotten a
few
things right in this life. When she said this, her eyes became moist, and she looked away quickly, remarking on how lovely the restaurant was—the arts-and-crafts style design, the soft amber lighting, and—rare thing in New York—the generous space between tables that allowed them to carry on a conversation without having to shout.

He said that Henry's had become a favorite. In fact, it had inspired him to think of working up a
Zagat
-style guide to the fifty
quietest
restaurants in New York City.

“Ah,” she said, “but once you published the guide, things would change—”

“You've just given me time for other projects. Thanks.”

“Ever the helpmate,” she said. “But you
do
have more time now, don't you, Paul? I mean—how be decorous?—I mean, since your wife died.”

“Yes.”

“Was she ill for a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind my asking, given that—?”

“There's no need to be discreet—that's what you meant, I think—not decorous—but I have no problem talking about
Lorraine. She had an especially debilitating form of MS—her mind was alert to the end, though she did require a good deal of
physical
assistance the last few years, especially with her ADL's.”

“ADL's?”

“Activities of Daily Living.”

“Like your brother then.”

“Like my brother.”

“Surely that thought—the parallel, which you could not have wished for—”

“As you noted, the unconscious never sleeps,” he said.

“Oh come on, Paul—no need to be snide. Surely it must have crossed your mind that here you were again, being the eternal caretaker…”

“My brother had muscular dystrophy—Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, to be exact, not multiple sclerosis—and yes, the thought crossed my mind, as it did Lorraine's. Taking care of Mort when I was a boy turned out to be excellent preparation for events of recent years. But how did you know?”

“Know you'd made the connection about caring for your wife the way you'd cared for your brother?”

“Know that I was a widower.”

“Ah
that
!” she said, and smiled. “I read it in the alumni magazine. My husband, Roger, went to Columbia too, if you recall, and I saw an item in the ‘Class Notes—' ” She paused, and when he said nothing, continued: “It's how I've followed you through the years—your family, your career. You've become quite the literary critic. I loved your book on the Irish and the Jews, by the way, and—”

“That was a scholarly book, not literary criticism, except in passing—more about immigration patterns and how—”

“—our distinctive cultures influenced the different ways we adapted to our lives in the New World. Do I have it right?”

“You really did read me then.”

“My genteel way of stalking, I suppose,” she said. “But we
used to talk about this stuff
all
the time. About how
different
our lives were, even though, as it turned out, we'd both been born and raised in Brooklyn, a few blocks from each other. Don't you remember how we used to speculate on our commonalities and differences in the way you do in your book, only much more articulately than I ever could—”

“Back then we were speculating in first draft,” he offered, “while in my book I was being articulate through nine years of revisions.”

“Sometimes—” she said, and hesitated before going on “—sometimes I like to think that if you hadn't known me, you would never have written the books you've written.”

“Sounds about right,” he said.

“So that, as you point out, the Irish, like my father, moved into politics, while the Jews, like…” She paused. “Sorry. I can't find the right words, but what I've really been wanting to say, as I tried to do in my note, is that your gift for words used to intimidate me—to make me feel
stupid
somehow. Did you know that? I always felt—
feared
—you were about to
correct
me, and, therefore, of course, to have reason to reject me.”

“But you rejected me.”

“Only in the fact,” she said, “But where was I—? Oh yes—the Irish moved into politics, while the Jews, like—”

“—like me?”

“Like you, yes.”

“While the Jews moved into matters more ethereal and intellectual?”

“Yet you were merchants too.”

“True, though when it came to my books, not very good merchants.”

He looked around the restaurant and, recognizing several colleagues, wondered what they would think, seeing him here with an unfamiliar and attractive older woman.
Your beauty used to intimidate me
, he thought of saying, even though back then—
could he tell her this now?—he had been disappointed to discover she was not upper class WASP, and not even lace curtain Irish like Grace Kelly, but working class Irish. He finished his drink, signalled to the waiter to bring two more.

“To have read T
he Irish and the Jews Come to America
,” he said, “is to make you one of a small but quite distinguished elite.”

“Oh come on, Paul, you're being—rare thing—falsely modest. You've produced an impressive body of work. Surely you've—”

“No,” he said. “I'm being honest. People outside of academia have vastly inflated notions of our successes. Mostly, as I tell my grad students, we're like caretakers in cemeteries, each of us tending to small plots of land—to the graves of one or two dead writers—pulling up weeds, repairing a headstone now and then, chasing away vandals—”

“Why do I get the feeling you're correcting me again?” she asked. “But okay, your book on James—
The Irish Henry James—
surely that attracted an audience beyond academia.”

“What did Roger do?”

“Roger was an accountant—well, more than an accountant: he was Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of a paper manufacturing company. You changed the subject.”

Their second Martinis arrived, and Paul raised his glass. “To us,” he said.

“Maybe it's the alcohol—despite my fabled heritage, I never could hold it well.” She grinned. “But okay, okay. I'm feeling fine—quite fine actually, though it saddens me to see you looking so gloomy. Moving right along then, let me be direct: Do you think we can be friends again?”

“Why not?” he said. “The students these days have a category they call friends-with-benefits.”

“Which means?”

“What do you think it means?”

She leaned back, a puzzled look on her face. Then her eyes went wide.

“
Really?
” she exclaimed.

“They seem, at least in conversations with me, to have no difficulties with it: with being friends with various people with whom they occasionally sleep. And yet—”

“Forgive me,” she said, the back of her hand to her cheek, “but I think I'm blushing, and that this is what Craig, my eldest, would call ‘a generation thing.' ”

“I was just teasing,” he said.

“No you weren't.” She looked at him with large, watery eyes.

“Have it your way. I
wasn't
teasing. You
are
still a most attractive woman, Margaret. In fact, when you walked in before, I thought: God—she looks just like her mother did, and your mother was a real looker—movie star gorgeous like the aging stars of the thirties and forties we loved—Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Mary Astor—you look the way she did, especially now that you've let your hair go to white—”

“
Silver
,” Margaret corrected. “Mother always insisted that her hair was neither gray nor white, but
silver
. Thank you for the compliment, I suppose—my Martinis and I thank you. What you see is real, by the way—no surgical enhancements. Mother is gone, of course. Yours?”

“Gone.”

“Mort?”

“The same—many years ago, and you know what?” he said, unable to keep his voice from rising. “My mother was right when she bolted from the Muscular Dystrophy Association—from all that Jerry Lewis bleed-with-me stuff. Remember how she'd refuse to watch the telethons?”

“I liked your mother. You get your passion from her—especially against injustice—and your eyes: those incredible graygreen-hazel-brown eyes that never stop changing. They're extraordinary. Can we have another round of drinks, do you think?”

“It's been more than half a century, and billions of dollars
wasted on research, and in the meantime, no help for the living, for the families that have to cope day by day, and—”

“Care not cure,” you used to preach. “I remember you talking about writing a book with that title.”

“Did I?”

He motioned to the waiter to take away their plates.

“I'll have coffee,” Margaret said to the waiter. Then, to Paul: “Forget the drink, but we do have time for coffee, yes?”