Acquainted With The Night Part 11

He told Joe and Jean he was going to rest for a while, and closed his door tightly behind him. He lay on the bed in the warm shaded room, intending to sleep, but he couldn't get her out of his mind-her eyes, her wet hair, her outrageous nothing of a bathing suit, the fair hairs on her legs, the feeling of her long fingers on his arms when he pulled her onto the boat. She was exciting him even in her absence, and he resented her for it. He preferred to choose the times he was available for arousal. Her kind of excitement was certainly not for him; it was excessive. He had ordered his whole life to avoid excess. Now this feeling came along, invading him without invitation or permission.

What was she, after all? He didn't know anything about her. He didn't even know if she had been to college, if she had an original idea in her head. Editorial a.s.sistant. Most likely a glorified secretary like the ones in his office, plodding through dull tasks all week and craving excitement on the two days of release. Or maybe she was the radical, slovenly type, angry at the world for her own shortcomings. He couldn't tell, hadn't even seen her dressed, except for the blue work s.h.i.+rt everyone wore these days. For all he knew, she went around in tattered jeans or long patched denim skirts. He probably wouldn't want to be seen in a decent restaurant with her.

He sat at the desk to try writing to Margaret. At least he knew who she was. Margaret was the personnel director of a large private hospital. She was steady, nice-looking, well-informed (she knew what a securities a.n.a.lyst was), and a hard worker. Indeed it was because she had to work overtime that she wasn't with him this weekend. Fleetingly he envisioned Margaret here, the convergence of Margaret and Deirdre at the lakesh.o.r.e, but pushed that from his mind; it was unthinkable. He and Margaret went out every Tuesday and Sat.u.r.day evening and returned to spend the night in his or her apartment, and when he left her the next day he felt refreshed and contented.

"Dear Margaret," he wrote. He would probably see her before she got the note, but it made him feel sober and virtuous to write, and she would enjoy receiving it. "It's a pity you couldn't be here this weekend. You poor thing, working away in the hot city." He hastily crossed that sentence out; it was an alien voice he didn't recognize, whose equivocation disgusted him even more than its condescension. He would have to copy it all over when he was finished.

"Joe and Jean had some friends over this afternoon and we sat around drinking. Decadent! Naturally I took the Sunfish out again. Twice."

He paused, a.s.saulted by memory and desire. It was no use. A crowd of fantasies stormed behind his tight-shut eyes-what he would do to her, what she would do to him. He would hold her up against the wall a few inches off the floor so that their eyes were level, unavoidable, and ram her ceaselessly, without mercy. He could see perfectly the startled, then melting look in her huge aqua eyes. He would catch her around the stomach from behind as she was stepping into the shower, drag her down the hall and throw her, her red hair heaving, her mouth howling shock and l.u.s.t, onto his white living room sofa. She would climb on top of him savagely and her hair would slide back and forth over his chest, and her tongue would lick his neck and lap inside his ear, tantalizing. He would lie quite still on the rug while, with burning fingertips and palms, she ma.s.saged every bit of him slowly from head to toe. Then he would roll her over and grind her into the floor as she cried out in amazement and clutched him closer. He covered his eyes with his fists to make the pictures stop, and found tears wetting his knuckles.

It was no use. He had wanted her, every d.a.m.ned inch, from the moment he saw her, but surely he would never call. He knew himself, his ways, too well to dream of changing course. There was altogether too much of her. She was too loud and took up too much s.p.a.ce and her hair was too reddish and fluffy. It didn't lie flat as it should. Girls' hair should lie flat, and if it couldn't, at least stay where it was put. Hers responded to every slight breath of wind or stirring of the air, billowed and streamed, so that around her splendid face was endless motion.

THE OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE.

DAVID, WHEN HE WAS feeling happy, used to dance for his children. The war was over, the Germans defeated. Once again he pranced across the living room raising his knees high in an absurd parody all his own, blending a horse's gallop and a Parisian cancan. Lucy, his youngest, would laugh in a high-pitched delighted giggle-David looked so funny dancing in his baggy gray trousers and long-sleeved white s.h.i.+rt with the loosened tie jerking from side to side. His business clothes. He wore them all the time, even at night after dinner. Sometimes at breakfast he wore his jacket too, as he stood tense near the kitchen sink, swallowing orange juice and toast and coffee, briefcase waiting erect at his feet.

When he stopped dancing he would smooth down his wavy dark hair modestly and catch his breath. "You like that, eh?"

Lucy was six. She wanted her father never out of her sight. She felt complete only when he was present.

"Yes. But why can't we have a Christmas tree?"

Lucy was eleven. They had a large family with many cousins, nearly all older than she was, and always getting married. At the big weddings the band music was loud and ceaseless. After the fruit cup and the first toast to the newlyweds, at some point during the soup, the popular dance tunes would give way to a rapping syncopated rhythm with the pungency of garlic and the ringing tone of a shout or a slap. The grownups leaped away from their bowls to form circle within circle, holding hands. Anna, Lucy's mother, was a leader. She was heavy, but moved nimbly. Her head would bounce up and down to the music as she pulled a line of dancers under a bridge of arms.

"You can do it too, Lucy," she called out. "Come on."

And the circle opened, hands parted to let her in.

David did not dance these dances. She saw him at the edge of the circle, his tie neatly knotted, observing keenly, lighting an olive-colored cigar.

He waltzed. He waltzed with her mother, the two of them floating with stiff, poignant grace. His face, sharp-boned, alert, was tilted up proudly, his hand spread out flat against Anna's broad back.

"But why," Lucy asked, "can't we have a Christmas tree?"

"Don't you know yet?" He was annoyed with her. "It's not our holiday."

"I know, but it doesn't really mean anything," she protested, leaning forward against the front seat of the car, flushed with the champagne they had let her taste. "It's only a symbol."

She could see the edge of his smile and knew he was smiling because she had used the word "symbol." She felt clever to have charmed away his annoyance.

In the morning she accosted Anna.

"Why is he so against it?"

Anna did not turn to face her. She was putting on mascara in front of the mirror, and the tiny brush she held near her eyes looked like a flag. "Because they made him wear a yellow arm band when he went to school."

"But ..." Lucy said. These bizarre facts tossed out at chance intervals made her feel another world, a shadow world, existed at the rim of their own. "But that was in another country."

"It makes no difference. The tree is the same."

She grasped that David was keeping something back from her, something that touched herself as well as him.

"What was it like when you were growing up?"

"We were poor," he said. "We worked, we studied. We lived where your grandmother used to live. It was very crowded."

"No, I mean before that. Before you came here." She whispered the last words shyly, for fear of somehow embarra.s.sing him.

"I don't remember."

"You must remember something. You were the same age as I am now, and I'd remember this even if I moved away."

He tightened his lips and turned to the bridge game in his New York Times, sharpened pencil poised.

Sat.u.r.days, driving into the city to visit aunts and uncles, they sped through shabby neighborhoods with once-fine brownstones, down streets where men in long black coats and fur hats and unruly beards shambled in the path of oncoming cars. They had hanging curls in front of their ears, delicate straggly locks that gave Lucy a feeling of weak revulsion.

"It's Sat.u.r.day," said David, "so they think they own the streets. No one should drive." He had to brake to avoid a group of teen-aged boys with unnaturally soft, waxy skin. Rolling down the window, he shouted, "Why don't you stay on the sidewalk where you belong?" Then, "Someone's got to teach them a little English," he muttered at the steering wheel.

"You sound like some ignorant peasant." Anna's eyes followed the group of boys sorrowfully. "Why can't you live and let live? And drive like a normal person?"

"Filthy refs," muttered David.

"What are refs?" asked Lucy from the back of the car.

"Refugees," said Anna.

With an inner leap of glee, she thought she spotted an inconsistency in David's thought, usually so logical. "Well, weren't you one too?"

"That's different."

"How?"

"They have no business looking like that. They give the rest of us a bad name. Lenin was right. Religion is the opiate of the people."

"Who was that again?" Lucy asked.

"Lenin. Vladimir Lenin."

"Oh, what kinds of things are you teaching her!" Anna exclaimed. "Leave her be."

He p.r.o.nounced Vladimir with the accent on the second syllable. Lucy made a mental note of that.

"What was it really like back there?"

"I don't remember."

But she was fifteen now, strong with adolescence and nearly full grown; she stood over him and waited while he turned the pages of his newspaper.

Finally he yanked off his gla.s.ses and looked up at her. "You really want to know? They came around at night and chased people out of their houses, then set them on fire. You were afraid to go to sleep. They sent you to the army for twenty years. They said we poisoned their wells and chopped up their babies. So everyone came here. One at a time. First Saul, he was grown up, then Peter, then Avi, then I came with my parents and the girls, because I was the baby. It stunk on the boat. People vomited all day long. All right?"

"All right, all right." She cringed and drew back from the brittle voice shouting at her. "All right, forget it."

Most of the time, if secretly, David was very proud of the way his life had turned out. Considering. He was proud of having married a good-looking American-born girl he fell in love with in high school. Anna kept a good home and took excellent care of the children, and when they went out to meet people she was just right, friendly and talkative, never flirtatious. He took pride in that wholesome, free tone of hers, so American. She was loving to him, though she might tease grudgingly if she thought he wanted her too often when the children were small and wore her out. Spirited, also: they disagreed often and loudly over petty things, but never over big things like right or wrong or decency or bringing up the family.

He was proud of their children, their house, and their car. He was proud most of all, though he would never have admitted this, of his perfect English, no trace of an accent. At school he had imitated the way the teachers spoke and stored their phrases in his keen ear. Walking there and home he moved his lips to practice, and when other boys ridiculed him he withdrew silently, watching with envy as they played in the schoolyard. He used to play too, back there, but now, after the trip and the ordeals of a new household in an incomprehensible land, he could not launch into games. His father never wearied of saying the four boys must work very hard to show they were as good as the others. They might not have much, but they had brains better than anyone else's. In this country lurked fortunes waiting to be s.n.a.t.c.hed up by boys with heads on their shoulders. After two years of effort David's speech was flawless, untainted, and he hoped that with the language embedded in his tongue he could do whatever he chose, that no one need ever know how foolish and awkward and alien he had once sounded.

His older brothers fared well too, and their English was fluent. More than fluent: they spoke with style and a feeling for diction and phrasing. Luckily, the family was gifted that way. But when he listened to them now, Avi and Peter and Saul, he detected a flavor of the foreign born. He couldn't place it-not any misp.r.o.nunciation or inflection, but something. He wished them no ill, these nattily dressed brothers with flouris.h.i.+ng businesses, but secretly he was glad to have been the youngest, best able to reshape the habits of his tongue. His sisters, already grown when they arrived, and pushed promptly into factories so that the boys might go to school, would always sound foreign. The oldest, Ruth, who had diligently mastered her English grammar, still kept an antique musical lilt, like a catch in the voice. It could take him unawares, even now, and bring unwanted, artesian tears to his eyes.

Their second night off the boat, an old uncle who had come two years earlier sat David's father down at his oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Along with countless bits of advice and lore, he instructed that the paper to read was the New York Times, and so David's father bought it daily, sending one of the boys out to the newsstand in the gray of morning with pennies in his pocket. The words "New York Times" were among the first in David's vocabulary.

Each night after ten hours bent over ledgers in the asphyxiating office of a Hebrew school, his father sat at the kitchen table learning English from the New York Times. No one was permitted to disturb him while he studied. Every two or three minutes he would look up a word in a black leather-bound dictionary, wetting the tip of his forefinger to turn its pages, which were thin and translucent like the wings of an insect. He was insect-like too, a small man with a small pointed graying beard, lined skin, and a black skullcap on his head. His shoulders were narrow and rounded. The sleeves of his white s.h.i.+rt were rolled up and his arms spread out over the open newspaper as in an embrace. When David recalled him now it was in that pose, hunched in the unshaded glare of the kitchen light, studying as he used to, except back there it was the Talmud and here the Times. He remembered how, near midnight, finished at last, his father would gather the family together and summarize for them the contents of the major articles in the New York Times. Then they could go to bed. And remembering, David was a.s.sailed by an irritating mixture of pride and shame and nostalgia, which he tried to evict from his soul.

David went to law school. He was a das.h.i.+ng sort of young man, he liked to think, and he enjoyed reminiscing about his bravado in taking the bar exam. Hardly studying, for he was busy driving a cab in his spare moments, he pa.s.sed the first time, usually a practice run. He hadn't even bothered checking the school bulletin board, but waited to find out the results from the list published in the paper. The achievement of pa.s.sing the bar exam was rivaled only by the achievement of having his name printed in the New York Times for all the world to behold. It was while studying law that he came to appreciate and to love-though David was not a man who acknowledged love readily-the peculiar genius of his adopted country, and to feel deep affinities with it. He responded to the Const.i.tution as an artist to an old master. A nonbeliever, in this he believed; he even admitted to feeling awe for the men who wrote it, though again, he felt awe for his fellow man rarely, all expectations and a.s.sessments of humanity having been incised on his spirit early on, in the years of the yellow arm band and the pogroms. He learned the Const.i.tution by heart and remembered it-this was another of the achievements he took pride in. And on days when the Supreme Court (pinnacle of his favorite branch of government, for he was, by temperament and heritage, judgmental) struck down or upheld laws in accordance with David's interpretation of the Const.i.tution, he was happy, and on those days he danced for his children.

He and Anna had two boys close together and then, ten years later, Lucy, who received the doting care spent usually on an only child. The boys turned out well, David thought, one a lawyer himself, the other an engineer; they married suitably nice girls, made money, and gave him and Anna grandchildren. And Lucy, he trusted, would be fine too. She had his head, quick and secret and sharp; though her temper flared up easily, like his, she didn't stay angry long. She could take care of herself and she was good-looking, which was important for a girl. All in all, a fine American girl.

Sometimes she made him worry, though. It was one thing to quote Marx and Lenin with righteous indignation-David did that himself-but another thing to take them seriously, especially here where matters were arranged otherwise, and it was just as well, too, for people like themselves. Lucy took it all far too seriously. She joined groups and recklessly signed her name to endless, dubious pet.i.tions. When David and Anna refused to sign or even to read those long sheets of paper she waved in their faces-for once you had signed your name who could tell where it would end up, no country is perfect, look at the business with McCarthy not so long ago-she got angry and made pa.s.sionate speeches. And if David defended the way things were, she retorted that his narrow-minded and selfish mode of thinking was precisely the trouble with this country. Moreover, he and Anna were stodgy, unadventurous, needed broadening. "Why don't you travel? You have the money. Go to Europe. See another culture, how other people live, for a change."

"I've been to Europe," said David with a sneer and a tilt of the head. Then he saw her face turn hurt and ashamed, and he was sorry.

By middle age, when the boys were already young men, he had grown slightly pompous. He could hear it in his voice, but felt he was ent.i.tled to it, after all. He had made a certain amount of money, had a certain status, and spoke with an authoritative air, in well-sequenced paragraphs expounding his views to his thriving family on political, economic, and moral issues. Anna, who had heard it all before, puttered in the kitchen; sometimes she would interrupt with a remark or anecdote that she mistakenly thought ill.u.s.trated one of David's points. But the boys listened respectfully, and even Lucy looked raptly attentive. Now and then he might stop to paraphrase something for her in simple terms and she would nod gravely, but he was never sure how much she understood. His vocabulary was studded with multisyllabic little-used words he enjoyed hearing spoken in his own voice. Among his favorites were "belligerent," "manifest," "deteriorate," "pejorative," complex words he had deliberately mastered years ago, words difficult not only to say but to use accurately, and on occasion he adjusted his thoughts to create opportunities to utter these words, feeling pride at the casual, indigenous way they slid off his tongue.

Sometimes he wished he had made more money. He was never quite sure he had made as much as his father had expected, when he told him, so many long years ago, to learn and show he was as good as the others. But since his father was dead now he would never know exactly how great those expectations had been. In any case, he had made enough. It was only when he thought of his brothers, and of childhood friends who had made more, that such doubts p.r.i.c.ked him.

The first day of college, Lucy's roommate, a blond girl from Virginia whose father was in the foreign service, asked where she was from, and Lucy replied, "New York City."

"No, I know that, it was on the list. I mean really where you're from." As Lucy stared at her quizzically, she added, "Where you were born."

"New York. I told you." And then Lucy stared, with some unease, at the twin beds, twin dressers, twin desks, all squared off and bland. David had warned that at a school like this one, a "cla.s.sy" school, as he called it, she would find bigotry, and she had brushed his warning off. For she had never, to her knowledge, experienced bigotry while growing up in New York City.

"I'm sorry," the girl, Patty, said with a harmless smile. "It's just that you have such a striking face, I was sure you were foreign. Middle East, Mediterranean, or something. I have a talent for placing faces-my parents dragged me all over the world, my whole life. Listen, all I mean is some people are lucky, that's all." Patty turned to the mirror in mock dismay, screwed up her ingenuous features, attempted a glamorous expression. "I mean, just look. No one would ever find me exotic." They both laughed, Lucy with relief. Patty was no bigot: exotic, she thought.

For months Lucy was exhilarated, as if she had discovered an intriguing new acquaintance; each evening she scrutinized her face, searching for what Patty had seen. It was true, a few of her aunts, with their olive skin, high cheekbones, and broad, almost Oriental faces, did look distinctly foreign, but she did not resemble them. Her jaws sloped down sharply to a strong chin. Her nose was straight and perfect, as her friends used to say enviously, her mouth small and finely curved. She had a high, smooth forehead with dark hair falling over it in calculated disarray, and dark, opaque eyes like David's. It was a good face-she was satisfied with it, but had never dreamed it might be exotic. She would not mention the incident to David, for she knew instinctively that he would not be pleased. David liked her to look like everyone else, and to wear whatever the girls were wearing that year. Often he asked her if she needed extra money for clothes, and when she came home for Christmas and Easter that first year he appraised her up and down and commented, in his understated way, "You look very nice. What do they call that kind of sweater?" Or coat. Or dress.

The following year she took an individual reading program in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. At the end there was an oral exam given by a panel of professors. She telephoned David long-distance the night before to find out the correct p.r.o.nunciation of all the Russian names. Her ear was acute. If David said them over the phone a few times she could copy them. And then, in her fantasy, the professors would say, "Where did you get such a fine Russian accent?" and she would respond, with nonchalance, "Oh, my father is Russian."

Smerdyakov, Nozdraev, Sviazhsky, Kondratyevna ... He resisted at first, but she coaxed until finally he said them for her, warmly, the heavy, earthy syllables rus.h.i.+ng through miles of telephone wire into her ear. Saying them, he sounded like a stranger. She penciled accent marks in the proper places and repeated the names after him, but was shy about repeating them as well as she could have done. She sensed David might not like her a.s.similating the alien sounds too perfectly.

Except the next morning at the exam she found that several of them were wrong. At least the professors p.r.o.nounced them differently. Lucy felt a shudder of fear, as if the room had suddenly gone cold. Who was David, really, and where was he from, if anywhere? And what did this make of her? The fantasy-"Where did you get such a fine Russian accent?"-never happened.

It could never have happened, she realized later. She had forgotten what Anna once told her privately, long ago. "Being Russian is one thing. Being Jewish, from Russia, is something else."

She learned also, in a history course, that it was Marx who first said, "Religion is the opium of the people," not Vladimir Lenin.

Months later, riding in David's car, Lucy said, "All those Russian characters in the books I studied for that course last year. They all had this great pa.s.sion about life. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes. Yes."

"Like your sisters. The women reminded me of them. And of me. They were all pa.s.sionate about different things, but underneath it was the same."

"Yes."

"Do you feel that way sometimes?"

"What way?"

"Pa.s.sionate. About life, I mean," she added when she saw him s.h.i.+ft uncomfortably in his seat.

David moved into the left lane to pa.s.s a car. A truck appeared over the crest of the hill, approaching them. Speeding up, David swerved to the right, and in a reflex action, as he used to do when she was a child, shot his arm out in front of Lucy's chest to s.h.i.+eld her. Safe again, he settled back and cleared his throat. "They always had much more respect for their great writers than we do here. You have to say that for them." It was understood that they never discussed his rash driving.

"Tell me, what was it like?"

"I don't remember."

"You must remember."

"It's so long ago, I can't."

"You left a brother over there, didn't you?"

"Yes, Mordecai."

"Well, what happened to him? Why didn't he come?"

"He was a grown man, established, with a wife and children and a job. It would have been hard for him to leave."

"Didn't you ever write to him?" She could almost touch it in the s.p.a.ce between them, her own pa.s.sionate urgency pressing him, and his resistance. "Didn't you ever want to know what happened to him?"

"He's probably dead now. Or else a very old man. Chances are he's dead."

"But why didn't you ever write? You could still try to ..." She was warm and full of energy; like those women in the novels, she could set out on a sacrificial trek to trace this lost brother or his descendants, if David would only ask.

"How could we write? There were wars and pogroms. You think it was as easy to correspond by airmail as it is now? ... Well, we did write, at first, then we lost touch. There were ... incidents. Killings. Didn't you learn any history? Didn't you learn about that famous ravine? That was our city." He pulled into the garage and leaned over to open the door for her. "You can afford to have pa.s.sion." He smiled and patted her hand. "Come into the house."

Lucy was twenty-six. The last of her many cousins was getting married and she was taking Allan to the wedding. She had met him during a trip to Mexico, at an outdoor market in a dusty village. He was buying oranges. The way he stood at the fruit stand, tall and lanky, in faded blue jeans and work s.h.i.+rt, handling each orange thoughtfully, tenderly even, before dropping it into his net sack, appealed to her. She moved nearby, hoping he would notice her and start a conversation, which he did. But first he held out an orange. She always remembered that, how even before he spoke he offered her something.

No doubt some of the aunts and uncles would comment teasingly about Allan's beard. Men like David and his brothers shaved fastidiously, beards being part of the detritus they had left behind them. She had also prepared him for their sly remarks about marriage; he had a gentle face and they would take liberties: "So what are you kids waiting for? See, it's painless!"

For surely David or Anna would not have told anyone that they already shared an apartment. That fact was a thorn to David, and she was sorry to inflict it on him in his vulnerable years. Anna didn't seem to mind as much. She kept up with changing times, wore pants suits now, read articles in magazines about drugs and venereal disease, and even thought the ponytail on her oldest grandson was cute. But David's views were ancient and changeless.