Acquainted with the Night

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Hey!” Deirdre called, waving. “Can you leave the boat and come in?”

  “I can’t. It would drift away,” he called back.

  As she came swimming towards him the pounding in his chest eased. He was afraid, though, that she might grasp the edge too hard and tip the boat over. The Sunfish capsized very easily. Jean and Joe upset it all the time in reckless play and then struggled to right it. But Gregory hated the feeling of slipping off. He had tried it once with Joe and landed awkwardly on his stomach, gulping cold water.

  He was relieved to see that she could be sensible. Treading to keep afloat, she placed one hand lightly on the edge, leaning no weight on it.

  “Go on, Gregory. You take a swim now and I’ll mind the boat. It’s glorious.”

  “No, I’ll swim later. There’s a wind coming up—we ought to go back.” He reached out and helped her aboard. He liked the feel of her upper arm; it was muscular and firm.

  “You know,” he said as she settled herself on the deck, “I was a little worried about you out there. The lake is deceptive. It’s about a hundred feet deep in this part.”

  “What’s the difference?” she said carelessly, intent on gathering the heavy hair in a coil and wringing it out. “Ten feet or a hundred. If you’re on top, it’s all the same. Oh, that felt marvelous.”

  “You’re a good swimmer.”

  “When I was a teen-ager I worked as a lifeguard.”

  He blushed under his tan, feeling an utter fool for having worried and trembled over her. The girl was a lifeguard, while his orange life jacket had lain like a badge of dishonor on the deck of the Sunfish.

  She stretched out flat to dry off in the sun. Her eyes were closed, so he could indulge himself, studying her as he would some wondrous natural terrain. The full curves of her breasts slipped down out of the sides of the scant bikini top; he could see where pale skin merged into suntan. Her stomach was flat and her hipbones jutted up sharply. Where her bathing suit cut across her thighs he could see a few curly hairs, but he looked away quickly, as if he were taking unfair advantage, looking there while her eyes were closed. Her body was ample, strong and large-boned, but not heavy. Five pounds more and there would be too much of her, but as she was, he found her perfect. Her wrists, an anomaly, were narrow and delicate; he could easily ring his thumb and forefinger around them. Drops of water were poised on the hairs on her knees. He wanted to run his hand over them and feel the damp, warm skin, but he didn’t dare.

  They were silent till they reached the dock, where she sat up and said, “Thank you. That was a lovely sail.”

  “My pleasure.” He smiled.

  As they walked side by side towards the others on the lawn he thought they must make a striking couple. He with his coarse black hair, dark skin, and straight features looked like an Indian, he had been told. Sturdily built now, far from the runt he had once been, he diligently kept his body in shape by playing squash during his lunch hour with Joe and other men from the office. He shouldn’t feel surprised that she seemed to like him. Girls did like him. He went out a lot, dinners and concerts and theaters; they liked being seen with him. It was only Margaret, though, whom he was close to. He must remember to drop Margaret a line later on.

  They all had another drink, and the Carsons and their friends swam, then said they had to be getting along; they had steaks marinating at home. Gregory wished he might have the chance to say goodbye to her alone, though what he wanted to say he didn’t know. It just felt clumsy this way, as if she were merely another stranger shaking hands, as if their shared sail were obliterated.

  Surprising him, she took his hand and pulled him aside.

  “Call me in the city, why don’t you?” She gave him her wide, frank look, straight into his eyes.

  He blinked under the gaze. “But I don’t even know—”

  “Deirdre, come on,” the others called.

  She turned to go to the car. “Call the magazine,” she whispered over her shoulder, then got in, slammed the door, and was gone.

  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 assistant. 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 shirt 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 analyst 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 lakeshore, but pushed that from his mind; it was unthinkable. He and Margaret went out every Tuesday and Saturday 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, assaulted 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 lust, 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 massaged 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 damned 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 space 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 shirt 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 embarrassing 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.

  Saturdays, 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 Saturday,” 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 pronounced 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 glasses 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 snatched 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 alie
n 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 mispronunciation or inflection, but something. He wished them no ill, these nattily dressed brothers with flourishing 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.