A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  Once, early in the morning, her eyes open and she sees a sliver of light that has slipped in through the crack between the drapes. The sheets, the smells, like any of the dozen motels where she and Ascher had stayed. The early morning light, his fingers roaming her hair, his words at this parting hour, always the same: I love you more than the moon, the earth and the stars. Syllables more hypnotic than any drug.

  Not until they were married did Rena recognize Saul’s kind of danger—the risk he posed to her self. Although Saul had never said it, he’d wanted her to be the doctor’s wife to his doctor. Not in the silly Junior League way in which Klara had been raised where the doctor’s wife and the minister’s wife were expected to lead the other women in their seasonal projects: the Sadie Hawkins Dance, the Chrysanthemum Fest, the midnight hayride, the canned goods drive. What Saul had wanted was more demanding. He’d wanted her to enter into his world of ideas, to read with him, to be his helpmeet in thinking through the endless vine of questions and paradoxes and dilemmas his work posed every day. But she hadn’t wanted to do it, to be his intellectual handmaiden.

  Of course, she’d never said this; instead, what she said was, “You’re lucky, you have your father to talk with about these things.” A look of pain darted across Saul’s face. He’d taken her remark to be the barometer she could now see it, in fact, to have been: that never had she wanted to fully immerse herself in him.

  IN THE MORNING, she returns to Mildred’s Ice Cream Parlor for tea and a roll. She has the same waitress: LINDA HERE TO SERVE YOU. Thin arms and legs, a little potbelly below her flat chest.

  Linda looks at her curiously. “You were here last night. Chicken rice soup, one scoop chocolate in a dish.”

  “Good memory.”

  “A curse. Someone who hasn’t been here in eight months, I’d still remember what they ordered the last time.” She opens the napkin dispenser and puts a wad of napkins inside. “You staying at the motel?”

  “Just last night.”

  “A war bride, huh? You got an old man up there in the dungeon on the hill?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  The woman reminds her of Sammy—the way she lets people feel she’s making room for them. “Your husband’s there, too?”

  “Four years in January. Two more to go. After a year of dragging my baby back and forth on the bus, I said screw this and we moved here. It turned out just fine. My little girl’s in school now, and she likes it a lot.” She tops off Rena’s water glass. “I’d eat more than that,” she says. “The food in that cafeteria is foul. You got kids?”

  “No.”

  “Most of the wives who don’t have kids are goners after the first year.”

  Rena puts down her cup. She’s had enough. She could leave now, gather her things, head to the register, but, in fact, it’s a comfort to talk without a cost. Even with Ruth and Maggie, the confidences threaten a balance between them in which at bottom they each aim to keep their troubles in their own corral.

  What she wants to ask Linda is: Did your husband lie to you? Over and over again? Were you able to forgive him? Will you ever be able to trust him again? Instead, she says, “I came here to tell him I want a divorce.”

  Linda whistles. “I can see why you’re not up for eating.” “Actually, I already told him. I wanted to have some more time to talk with him.”

  “Well, good for you, honey. A lot of them don’t even show up to deliver the news.”

  “I thought about it. Sending a letter. Only I thought it would haunt me, not knowing how he reacted.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “It’s hard to say. He didn’t really say anything.”

  “He must’ve known.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They know. It’s amazing what these guys know. It’s like there’s a brotherhood among them. There was a customer here, about a year back, a little guy with a squeaky voice, pushing forty and still living with his mother. Talking about her, too, all the time. He was sweet on me in this harmless way, giving me moonie eyes, always asking to be seated at my station, leaving a dollar tip on a cup of coffee. Probably just needed somebody to think about when he jerked off in the shower. Sorry, don’t mean to be rude, but you know what I mean. Nothing more than that. Never so much as asked me for my phone number. Somehow my old man, he knew.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I swear to God. One week I notice I haven’t seen Squeaky here in a couple of days, and next thing I know, someone tells me he got beat up in the driveway of his house. A stocking face came after him with a crowbar and broke his nose. Told him this was just the hors d’oeuvre to what would happen if he showed up here again.” She wipes her hands on her apron. “I felt awful. I wanted to go visit him, but I was afraid it would make it worse.”

  Rena picks at her roll. She thinks about Saul’s raised eyebrow. “How did your husband find out?”

  “Beats me. Maybe someone who used to be up there was in here and saw Squeaky staring at me. My old man wouldn’t say. That’s the other thing. They’re close-lipped as the Masons.”

  “DID YOU KNOW?” she asks after Saul sits down. They’re in a different room today. There’s a larger table with a heart etched into the surface: RICKY AND JONI FUCKIN FOREVER.

  “Know what?”

  She’s not sure what she means—did he know about Beersden or did he know that she’d decided to ask him for a divorce. If he knows about Beersden, she wants to reassure him that it’s over, that Beersden has nothing to do with it. But if he doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to tell him.

  He looks at her frankly and she sees he is shedding his boyish dreaminess, his love affair with ideas. It’s the first time she has ever felt a sharpness to him, a challenging edge, and it embarrasses her to discover that she finds it exciting.

  “That you were planning to ditch me?” he says.

  She starts to cry. It appalls her that it is she, not he, with the tears. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.” He reaches out and wipes her eyes with his sleeve. “Listen to me. It’s my fault. I’m not saying that masochistically. Just realistically. I betrayed you. You have every right to leave now.”

  Her chest feels unbearably heavy, as if an enormous piece of furniture—an armoire or a breakfront, something laden with silver and crystal and years of use—has been set on top. For the first time in a long while, she feels the stirrings of the love she’d had for him. Not in a way that suggests she’s making a mistake but rather to remind her of the life that has passed between them.

  She fights the temptation to erase what she’s said. To go back to the pretenses of the past months: things will change, time will heal what has happened if only she will endure. In his frank gaze, she detects his plea that she speak honestly with him, that if he is to survive the years here it must be without artifice. She gropes to gather her thoughts, to say what is most true. “It’s not that, really. It’s not that I want to be rid of you or to stop being involved with you.”

  He is watching her intently.

  “I can’t sleep with you again. I can’t carry on as though we’re going to live together again and go forward and do all the things married people do.”

  There is a slight tremor in his bottom lip. “So what do you want?” “I don’t know. Remember when we first met? That first afternoon at Cafe Vivaldi, when you came with a copy of the op-ed piece I’d written all marked up with your questions and comments and we just talked? No flirting, no seduction games. Just talked. I was so exhilarated. I’d never talked with a man like that. I’d talked with Rebecca, but she was always so far ahead of me. With you, it was the pure pleasure of sharing ideas and spurring each other to think more.”

  She traces the graffiti heart with a finger. “Please don’t be hurt by this. But I think that’s what we did best.”

  “You mean sex was a bust.”

  “Not a bust. You were the first man I ever really felt anything with.
I can’t call that a bust. But I realize now that it was because it was like sex without being sex.”

  “You seemed so fragile. I held myself back. It was as much for me as for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a convenient way not to face certain troubling parts of myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since I’ve been here. The way Marc and I divvied up the world. Or rather, being the older one, he grabbed certain things for himself and I was left to pick among the remains. He took all the machismo stuff: sports, girls, the aggressive career. I got the Talmudic approach, androgyny, these impossible ideals. He screwed fifteen girls in high school and collected football trophies. I spent the afternoons debating the philosphical underpinnings of psychoanalysis with my father.”

  “Poor Saul. Then you get me, whom you have to treat like a convalescent. What you needed was a lusty girl with a nice bottom who would let you enjoy yourself.”

  “You’ve got a nice bottom.” “Too bony.”

  “But nice.”

  They gaze at each other, and Rena feels astonished that this is happening, this warmth between them. “I just want to talk with you. I guess that’s what it boils down to,” she says.

  His eyes dampen. “That was the worst part about the drugs. Words became sounds employed for deceptions.” He pushes his hair off his forehead and she sees the fine physiognomy of his oval face, remembers a conversation once, shortly after they became lovers, when he’d talked about language as the most profound achievement of humanity, the ability to use the tongue and the palate to create a bridge between two minds. His voice softens, thins like a stream running into a silt plateau. “It’s a relief for me, too.”

  “How so?”

  “Less pressure. Less guilt. I can’t promise how I’ll react if you say there’s another man. I guess I’ll have to handle that as it comes.”

  “There’s not another man.”

  He looks at her steadily. This is the watershed, she thinks: if she can tell him about Beersden.

  “There was for a few months, but it’s over.”

  Briefly, he covers his face.

  “I’m sorry. Should I have not told you?”

  “No. This won’t work if you have to hide things.”

  “Do you want to know more?”

  “Do you want to tell me more?”

  “He was married with two daughters. It was a built-in limit. Not that I was in love with him. I never fell in love with him.” She pauses. He’s asking for the truth, she reminds herself. “The most significant thing was it made me realize I’d stopped feeling married. I felt like he was married, but not me.”

  A tear cascades off Saul’s cheek. She watches his chest rise and fall. “It’s amazing, isn’t it,” he says, “that there’s no ceremonial way of dissolving a marriage. No reverse marriage rites. At least we’re not Catholic. To end the marriage, we’d have to declare it had never existed.”

  “This existed. I would never want to say our marriage did not exist.”

  Saul takes her hands in his and, despite the prison injunctions, holds them—gently, like two injured birds. She closes her eyes to keep from weeping. She feels certain that their minds are on the same thing: how much simpler it would be to mourn a love destroyed than this, a love never fully formed. She feels his thumbs tracing the bones in her fingers, one by one, until they both startle with the rap of the guard on the glass.

  9 Leonard

  I plan to call her on Thanksgiving Day. My mother always called me on Thanksgiving Day. My Uncle Jack, who devoted himself to Americanisms, who took the turkeys and firecrackers and little red, white and blue flags as seriously as his father had the unfurling and furling of the Torah each Yom Kippur, always called my mother on Thanksgiving. The bigger the turkey, the more American. Jack pronounced big the way you and Marc did as toddlers: bee-ig. One year he claimed that my Aunt Mindyl had roasted a thirty-three-pound bird. My mother laughed and laughed: “The butcher, knowing Jack, stuffed the neck with stones.”

  After Marc moved to Atlanta and you missed two Thanksgivings due to being on call, I gave up on preparing a holiday meal. If I’m willing to participate in your mother’s dance about not feeling well enough, she is perfectly happy to go to the Ramada Inn where they do the entire spread, pumpkin soup to pumpkin pie. No matter the weather, she wears her full-length mink, the last present from her father. Thinking about it now, I don’t know why you and Rena have never joined us. Did we ask and you declined or did I assume it would be too bizarre a grouping, the four of us seated in the windowless mirrored dining room of a motel whose main attraction is its proximity to the parkway?

  Thanksgiving morning, I rise as always at five. Making coffee, I watch the birds pecking for seeds. Never, it occurs to me, have we had a bird feeder. All these years watching them scavenge for food, and never once have I taken the hour to go to the garden supply store and buy a feeder. Shtetl mentality. Jews from the Bronx don’t go to garden nurseries. It’s Italian men who plant yellow rosebushes and blue hydrangeas, who keep basement workshops where they probably make their own bird feeders.

  I take a box of bread crumbs from the cabinet and open the kitchen door. In my slippers and pajamas, I step into the cold morning air. It takes a moment for the dampness to seep through the flannel. I sprinkle the patch of grass just beyond the patio. Back inside, I watch a flock of sparrows descend. They peck for the crumbs, their beaks tiny jackhammers.

  I wonder if you are still sleeping. Rather, I wonder if you have slept at all. This last month, you have reassured me that Rena’s announcement that she wants a divorce has been a strange relief. At first, I wondered if this was just more of your masochism. Like when you were first arrested and Morton told us you wanted to plead guilty. That in your perverse logic, it is a good thing for you to suffer so therefore you feel less depressed. When I asked you about this, you looked perplexed and then amused: “It’s nowhere near that elegant. Once I got over the self-pity about Rena leaving me and the anxiety about living alone after I get out of here, I had to admit how impossible marriage is for me now. About as likely as someone who’s just had open-heart surgery going mountain climbing.”

  The question I want to ask you but cannot is: Was it sex? Was sex the problem? I feel certain that the answer is yes but that you would not be able to say so. Not out of prudery but rather out of ignorance. Perhaps this is my arrogance to think of you as a sexual innocent. Still, I imagine you and Rena as twin flamingos, your spindly legs planted in watery marshland, your delicate necks caressed by the balmy breezes. Your fussy sleep. Your non-appetites. No alchemy, no fire in two such similar creatures. I believe this. I do. That we are built to desire the dissimilar. That we cannot rely on morality alone to ward off incest but need to have lust itself most inflamed by what is different.

  Seeing you without the cloak of lethargy, I actually felt alarmed. Were they giving you an experimental mood elevator? Something that would burn out your serotonin circuits? I was relieved when you said your sleep remained poor—that whatever shift taking place in you was at least in this way proceeding gradually. Ever since you could get out of your crib on your own, I recall your episodes of sleeplessness. At two, when you still slept in pajamas with feet, I would hear you padding out of your bedroom, your eyes bloodshot with fatigue, dragging your blanket, tearful that you couldn’t fall asleep. Your mother had no patience for this. She’d grown up in a household where there were clear and abundant rules for children. “Never would I dare get out of my bed without my parents’ permission. It was the same with food. I never even opened the icebox until my thirteenth birthday.” No wonder, I thought, she’d been so intemperate once given the opportunity. Hell, if they’d let her get her own juice, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten drunk and gone to bed with me and maybe we wouldn’t be so miserably here.

  Now I know that your sleeplessness was our fault, your mother’s and mine. You couldn’t sleep because we never helped you learn how. Even when we lived in Jack�
��s dining room, my mother always made bedtime a thing so sweet it is painful to recollect. We would lie on our cots while she read to us in her hushed alto voice: first picture books for Lil and me, then a chapter from a girl’s adventure story for Rose and Eunice. She’d close the book and come to each of us, one at a time—Rose, then Eunice, then Lil, then me—kissing our cheek, stroking our hair, whispering, I love you, I love you, my child. Solemnly, my father would follow behind, awed by this piece of beauty my mother created in our cramped quarters.

  In my study, I close the scrapbook left open on my desk and turn on the computer. I stare at the screen and the words stare back, white and inert. My lids are heavy. Already, at six in the morning, it seems too late.

  I lay my head on the desk, close my eyes, slip into sleep as quickly as a stone dropped into a cold clear quarry. Twenty minutes later, I wake and immediately begin:

  On March 18, the day after the baby was found drowned, Carmelita woke to the sound of banging. The village women had come to exorcise the devil from her. With Carmelita still on her mat, they dismantled the hut piece by piece. She lay motionless on the dirt floor during the hour it took them to tear the straw from the wood frame and then hack the frame to bits. When they were finished, they poured goat urine over her garments, rubbed chicken blood in her hair and left her lying bare to the elements in the midst of the rubble.

  AT ELEVEN, I STOP to prepare your mother’s breakfast. I make a fresh pot of coffee and scramble eggs with salami, a dish she wrinkled her nose at the first time I cooked it for her but devoured after tasting it and then began to request. Although I’m the one who comes from the peasant stock (you cannot imagine how intimidated we immigrant Ukrainians were of the second-generation German Jews with their heritage of professorships at the university in Frankfurt and diamond stores in Berlin, how often your mother in the first years of our marriage would remind me of these differences between my family and the Jewish colleagues her father had known), your mother is the one who possesses the peasant’s appetite and body, too: the broad hips, the round belly, the square face, all exaggerated now by a quarter-century on the horizontal.