Vinnie, I called him. Vincent the Robe.
Then Skype with Baruch. And later, with Aviva. Endless, endless Skype.
Here I am at six months: Standing outside security at the airport in Pittsburgh, bouncing at the knees like a kid. Waving when I spot him. Hurrying forward. Baruch, letting his bag drop. Embracing in the midst of the stream of travelers in a way I had witnessed, envied, and never fully understood. Embracing again, separating. My hand on his cheek, the intangible feelings brought to life. Kissing, embracing—real, it is real. The flesh of my loved one is just divine. His scent, the roughness of his cheek, unshaven for a day, the smell of his shirt. My hand at his waist. “Oh, Chubby, don’t you eat when I’m not around?”
Chubby or Fat Man, that’s what I called him. Or Chub, as if he really was a fish that Dina reeled in first. (Dina, who claimed to be delighted by our liaison, took credit for it, married a retired chemist in Haifa, called me less often, then not at all.)
On the drive home, he observed this city where I lived, this young place, with streams cut deeply into the shale and jagged mountains. No Crusaders had tromped down these roads, no Romans, Ottomans, or Greeks, no Bedouin or Druze. Scant evidence of Native Americans remained, only a couple of forts from Revolutionary times, some grand edifices left behind by robber barons, such recent history compared to his.
I’d planned a post-industrial tour, beginning high up on Mount Washington, where he could see where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers merged to form the Ohio, and picture the era when factories and mills lined those river banks. Then later, before taking the incline down the mountain, we could see photographs from those smoky, prosperous years, and maybe on our last day drive to the Laurel Highlands to Falling Water, the Frank Lloyd Wright house. While planning this tour, I was surprised to find myself telling a story about the emergence of love. I hadn’t realized until then how fond I’d grown of my city.
On Baruch’s first morning with me, Jessie did not scream, and we slept until the crows woke us with their harsh squawking. Still in bed in Pittsburgh, we had our first serious talk about the need to balance work and love. It was still hypothetical, but we knew it would be crucial. Others who’d managed love at a distance spoke of the necessity of figuring this out.
When we got up, I showed him the alcove in my apartment where I’d set up my desk and urged him to make it his own. “Now,” I said. “Just try it out. See if you like the chair.” It would be necessary. We were adults and knew that much. We could hold each other for hours, swear we’d never tire of our kisses, look up and know that we would.
We knew everything. We were smart and experienced. Baruch had even read the Book of Love, my name for Dorothy Tennov’s research on limerence, that crazy, weak-in-the-knees period at the start of love affairs. We were amused to think that we were closing in on the expiration date for the limerent stage; we were amused by everything. In those days, he could quote from Tennov’s research, read passages, and joke about how we were nearing the end. You can know it’s a stage and still be deliriously in it. You can say, “Tick tock, baby,” while doing a striptease, as I did, because the end, while inevitable, feels unreal. Something that happened to others.
I’d seen his imperfections, his humanness, and knew he was no prince, and even so, we approached the end of the limerent stage and still raced into each other’s arms as if we could outrun time. We acted as if what we had together was somehow different, better than what others called “love,” and at the same time we were old enough—bruised, savvy, jaded enough—to laugh at ourselves, to acknowledge the inevitability of change.
We did not believe it. Not really.
Tick tock. Dina faded, and he did not, because he was my bashert, my intended, and we were walking toward his car, toward my car, toward his plans, towards mine, which we might keep or might not, it hardly mattered.
Time was different for us. At some point, after a year had passed, I attempted to calculate what our twelve months together would have equaled if we’d seen each other every night, but I failed, and it was okay. What we had instead was a year of seeing each other whenever we could, on each visit stepping out of our ordinary lives. Maybe that was why we did not hear the bell toll.
Thirty-Two
Baruch’s mother, a small, round woman with hair dyed the color of pomegranates, dressed in a sleeveless orange shift the day we met. It was two months before his second visit to Pittsburgh, the terrible one. Baruch had told me she’d had many miscarriages before his birth and had regarded him as a miracle. When she opened her arms to hug him, I saw that she’d never altered her view. I’d always known he’d been loved, could feel it in the unapologetic way he carried himself. Now, though, when she released him, she opened her arms again and embraced me, then gestured to the seat beside her. When I sat she took my hand and squeezed it.
“Her parents are alive?” she asked Baruch in Hebrew. “She has children? Sisters and brothers?”
After he answered, her voice became stern.
“She’s worried I won’t know how to take care of you,” he said.
“Tell her you’re doing fine, that you’ve made me very happy.”
Later, his daughter arrived with her partner, Natalia, and some family from his father’s side. I watched them joke and argue, doze in the corner, eat with their fingers, perch on a kitchen counter, and I thought, as I had at Mindy’s, that this was what it was like to have a family, a we, an us. Once, I’d asked Baruch why my feelings for Aviva had emerged as soon as I knew she was alive. Why had I wanted to care for her? Why did it matter that my cousin’s wife had found some of the surviving remnants from my father’s once-large family, in Lima, Peru, and Sao Paolo, Brazil, where a cousin, Florencia Bursztein, was a watercolorist of some renown? Why did it matter that in a photo of my paternal grandparents—a bosomy, solemn-faced woman, standing with a palm on the shoulder of her tiny, seated spouse—their two olive-skinned girls, dressed in fancy white blouses, had narrow faces and almond-shaped eyes like mine?
As a species, we lived in small groups, he’d said. “We recognize our own and distrust the other; this tendency is encoded in our genes. We’d no longer exist if not for this behavioral adaptation.”
This earlier conversation distressed me the afternoon I met his family, reminding me that what was good—kin, us, family—had a deadly flip side. Not us, them. Once again, I did not know what sadness to take on, what inequity to accept. I left Israel, this tormented land I’d tried not to love, and went home to my country, engaged in its own long, heartrending war in the Middle East.
The terrible visit began this way: Baruch had a conference in Arizona and a collaborator arriving at his lab in Tel Aviv a week later. He’d looked at a map of the U.S., saw that Phoenix was two inches from Pittsburgh, and shrank the distance. It was still a time when everything seemed possible. I suggested he postpone, and he said, “You don’t want to see me?”
I did want to see him. I always wanted to see him.
It was the end of August, and hot air blanketed the city. I arrived at the airport ridiculously early, bounced at the knees, raced toward him the second I caught a glimpse. He dropped his bag when he reached me, and we embraced in the midst of the stream of travelers just as before. I touched his face, hugged him, touched his face again, as if I still needed proof he was real. What? I pinched his waist and felt his uneasiness. Oh Chubby. It was like swallowing a bristly little seed.
That seed went down hard and lodged in my gut. I did not say, “You seem anxious! Distracted.” Because I had no words for this bristly discomfort, could not articulate my fear that something was wrong when there was no evidence. In the car he confessed to feeling pressured by work, and so as soon as we got back to the apartment, I led him to the alcove, patted my desk, and reassured him. “Do what you have to do,” I said. “Take whatever time you need.”
I unzipped his laptop sleeve, opened his computer, mad
e him set out his work. I could not see myself slipping into the good-girl dance of my childhood, could not sense how uneasy this dance was making him.
The tomatoes in the salad I made were mealy, the couscous over-salted. We picked at dinner, made love, woke to Jessie’s screams. Baruch wrapped a pillow over his head, and I sat with my hand on his back, and waited for my heart to slow. While Baruch was still beneath his pillow, I got up to shower. By the time I was out of the bathroom, he was sitting in the alcove with his back to me.
“Hey!” I called softly. “Yo!”
When he failed to turn, a voice, detached from my discomfort, piped up. Let the man work in peace!
My ability to cooperate was limitless; I was a most compliant girl. I slipped on a T-shirt and shorts, left a note on the table, tiptoed out.
Went out for bread. Call when you’re up for company.
I’d signed it with x’s and o’s, picked up a loaf of olive sourdough bread, stopped at my office. An instructor in Nomi’s studio was leading a group of older women in Gentle Yoga. She enunciated each word, her voice full of syrupy cheer.
I turned on the lights, my computer, the radio, hoping to drown her out, wishing I could fall into my work, the way he fell into his, and lose this sense of foreboding. Nothing has happened, I told myself. Nothing at all. I recalled the Fridays when I stayed late to call my mother. The way I had braced myself. Ask for nothing. All these months, he had quenched my fear so completely I’d forgotten the old terror of wanting. Alone and unsettled in my office, that wanting made me feel boneless and vulnerable.
He did not answer my call. After an hour, I went home.
He turned slowly in the desk chair, annoyed. “Where were you?”
I lifted the bag of bread. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Did you see my note?”
He studied me in a slow, critical way. “No.” Drawn out. Dubious.
“I was trying to give you a break.” I picked up the note, showed the x’s on the bottom. “Those are the kisses. The o’s are the hugs.” I felt foolish trying to explain this. “Hey, are you upset about something?”
“That girl.” He pointed below. “How can you live here?”
“It’s just for a while. I didn’t want to rush into buying just any house. I’m looking for a place I can make into a home.” For us, I was thinking. “A place you could feel comfortable. You know?”
Maybe not, since he said nothing. I asked if he was feeling caught up. If he wanted some bread and cheese. Not that either.
Love withdrawn—that’s how I would describe what I felt when I took in his expression. “If you’re feeling pressured, just keep going,” I said. “You have all day and night if you need it.”
He stood, arched his back. “Don’t we have plans with your friends?”
“Sure, but I could go alone if you’re busy.”
This suggestion displeased him. “I thought you wanted me to meet your partner?”
“I do,” I said.
“Then why would you go alone?”
“I just thought. I wanted to make sure...”
All these jagged stops and starts.
“Then I’ll finish what I’m working on, and we’ll go as planned. B’seder?”
He turned away before I could agree, yes, b’seder. There was only his blue shirt and the curls at the back of his head, and my desire to step behind him, kiss the nape of his neck, slip my fingers into his hair, have what we’d shared for all these months, that now felt like a soap bubble.
I stepped into the bedroom instead, felt the clock, each bruising tick digging into me, reminding me how little time we had together. What would I do if I felt this unsettled when he left? How would I get through the weeks? I wanted to walk over to him, to call his name, and didn’t, because it would break the rules we’d set ourselves.
I did not see myself sinking, too vulnerable to ask that small, essential question I would always need to ask. Do you love me still?
Until it was late. And then later, in a tentative way, “Am I interrupting?”
“No, no.” He checked his watch. “We should go. Your friends are expecting us.”
My friends. I draped myself across his lap, felt his ribs and knees, kissed his rough cheek, wishing we could drop everything and be where we’d been before.
“Yes,” I said. “I need to prove to Les that you exist. He’s convinced I invented you, that all the nice things I report are part of a marketing campaign to change the public perception of Israeli men.”
“Should I prove him wrong?”
“You wouldn’t know how,” I said.
“I could skip my shower.” He held onto his chair arms and hoisted himself up and I spilled from his lap, surprised to find myself on my feet.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Vered, why do you keep asking?”
He took a long shower. I waited, knocked, feeling needy, childish, asking to come in. He said, “Of course,” and I sat on the edge of the tub, watching this man with a white, shaving-cream beard make faces in a misty mirror. No one I knew.
Les still owned a Federal house in the Mexican War Streets, even now that he lived with Nomi. He still needed that residence as an emergency exit, would not rent it or put it up for sale. I wasn’t surprised Les loved Nomi, since I’d watched it emerge, and I’d expected his transition from tolerating her daughter to falling for her. That he loved Nomi’s old farmhouse “in the boondocks,” with its slanting pine floors and low ceilings was as unexpected to me as the voice that had emerged when I was with Aviva. Les redesigned Nomi’s kitchen. During the renovation, contractors found a hearth inside a wall. They had it restored and turned it back into a working oven.
When Baruch and I arrived, the oven was fired up for pizza, and all the guests had brought the ingredients for their favorite pies. They came with custom semolina flour, porcini, pesto, fontina, sundried tomatoes, homemade sauce. I hadn’t known how broad and deep was the world of pizza or how I’d overlooked this part of the invitation and had showed up with only a bottle of wine, in attire that was all wrong. My tunic, too sparkly for this crowd in aprons and jeans, with bell-shaped sleeves that would drip in sauce.
While I was being embarrassed, the guests, mostly strangers, were busy rolling their crusts, assembling their toppings, exchanging arcane information about artisanal flours and cheeses and their sources for these ingredients. By the time I steadied myself enough to introduce Baruch to the few people I knew, he was talking contentedly to a woman whose hair hung in long, gray spirals.
I was standing alone in the pantry when Nomi found me. “He’s just lovely,” she said, after brief kisses, one per cheek.
“Yes,” I agreed. The ache rose in my chest, bruising my ribs. “He really is.”
“You must laugh when you hear Les complain about this commute.”
He and Nomi had grown up in the same city, worked in the same building, spoke the same language. They woke in the same bed each morning, renovated a kitchen, spent time with a child, become part of a community. “We’re doing okay with the distance,” I said. “When we’re together, it’s just so great.”
Standing there, the reality of what I’d never have by choosing someone who lived so far away hit hard. I looked for Baruch, hoping he might nudge me out of my funk, but where was my Fat Man, my bashert? Talking to a pizza maker with platinum blonde hair, crimson lipstick, and boots. “The thin crust is splendid,” he was saying. “And the mushrooms, what are they?”
“Shiitake and porcini. I use a mix of whatever I can get.”
“From the fields?”
“The fields! Ah ha ha!” She laughed, got a bit wobbly. Clutched his arm for support.
At last we could leave. On the drive home, he said, “You have interesting friends. The woman with the blonde hair...”
“No idea who that was. Whatsoever. Never
laid eyes on that chick.”
Did I actually say that? I did.
We did not make love that night. It was the first time we’d switched off the lights and turned away.
I felt him prop his hands behind his head, as awake as I was. “Can’t you sleep?” I asked after a while.
“All that cheese. My stomach is upset.”
“There’s a twenty-four-hour drugstore nearby. I could run out and get you something.”
“Stop running and go to sleep,” he said sharply.
“Why are you so testy?” I asked.
“I need some sleep before that girl will wake us up.”
The clock confirmed this. In five hours, Jessie could start screaming. My head already ached.
When I woke, I was alone. Loss was like the engine of a train that had taken me into a long dark tunnel. Gone. So was the second, more reasonable voice. All I felt was the fear that it, our bond, our love, had been severed. There was no shomer, sitting in a corner of the room, waiting to catch it. Gone.
Outside the sky had brightened, though no sun shone in that milky sky. He was not at my desk in the alcove. I waited for him to return, so far down it was as if I had returned to the dark room of my childhood, a place of no solace.
I clutched my phone, ready to call. Then footsteps. The front door opening. He’d been standing outside. His face was puffy. “Every day is like this? So dreary.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not like in the land of eternal conflict, where the sun always shines.”
He took in my tart words without comment. “I checked the flight board. Both flights are still listed as on time.”
He wasn’t scheduled to leave until late that afternoon. “Someone’s in a rush,” I said.
Breakfast? Neither of us wanted to eat.
The coffee was bitter. “Terrible coffee,” I said, pouring what was in my mug down the drain.
He checked his watch, returned to the desk I’d set up for him, my desk at other times.
In the shower, a voice of reason rose. Get a grip! His stomach ached from all that cheese. Deadlines pressed on him. He’d never been deceitful, never withdrawn his love. Nothing foreshadowed a change of heart. Unless seeing Nomi and Les in their remodeled kitchen, in the same house, same city, same country, had shaken him the way it had shaken me. Maybe he’d felt it before he’d arrived and intended to tell me now. Couples parted all the time. Breakups were as common as dirt.
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