Broken Leaves of Autumn

by Eli Hai

  Slowly, he adjusted to his new work and surroundings. Like Rico said, the aches abated, and suddenly, the work wasn’t as hard. He equipped himself with a Discman, listened to music, and sometimes he even sang while cleaning the windows. And so, summer passed. In the winter, he started doing various maintenance jobs. Every few days, he’d go to Rico’s and eat the delicious food his wife prepared. He was also a guest at Ahron’s house, and the two became fast friends.

  But the nights were hardest. When he lay down to sleep, he was swamped by waves of loneliness. He was attacked by bouts of homesickness, especially for his sister. On his first day in New York, he called home to talk with his mother. Her voice was cold and alienated.

  “How are you, Mom?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she answered dryly.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye…”

  “You didn’t have to! The important thing is you’re happy now,” she replied laconically, but her anger was evident in her tone. Was it because he didn’t say good-bye, or for some other reason? When he asked to speak with his sister, his mother told him Pam wasn’t at home, but he had a feeling she was lying. Two weeks later, he sent her letter, in which he told her what was happening with him, and promised to come visit soon. His letter went unanswered. After a month, he sent another letter, which went unanswered, as well. He’d expected his mother to ignore his letters, but why didn’t Pam answer? Maybe she was mad at him, too? Mad that he had abandoned her and left her alone with their parents, in her deteriorated mental state. No doubt, she was mad at him and rightfully so. That’s why she wouldn’t answer.

  Every day, he went to the mailbox, hoping to find a letter addressed to him, but to no avail. At the end of summer, he finally received the much-hoped-for letter from his sister. It was written in sloppy, unclear handwriting, which indicated she was agitated. Pam apologized for not answering for such a long time. She wrote how much she missed him. In the end, she asked about his welfare in a formal manner and wished him the best in all his ventures. When he finished reading the letter, he felt as though something was wrong. The next day, he called again. This time, his sister was on the other side of the line.

  “He….llo,” she answered with difficulty.

  “Hey, Pam, it’s me, Jeff. How are you, sweetheart?”

  When she heard his voice, she started crying. Several long minutes passed until Jeff managed to calm her down and gently prompt her. She told him that their father was very sick, and their mother wasn’t at her best either. She told him that she was depressed, that her stutter had increased, making it hard for her to talk with people.

  “What’s the bastard suffering from?” he asked first about his father’s condition, and not necessarily because he was worried about him.

  “H-h-h-h...is l-liv-ver isn’t o-ok-kay. T-the d-d-d...octor says that it’s no longer functioning, and he has only a few more weeks to live,” she stuttered, sorrow absent in her voice.

  So, the old sinner was dying? How about that? His birth father was on the verge of death. On the other hand, who said he was his dad? Maybe the mean old drunk wasn’t even his father. Perhaps there was truth in the accusations he’d hurled at his mother, that they’d been born in sin. And if it was true, how come he never heard all sorts of malicious rumors and gossip from the townspeople? And yet, he and his father had a strong resemblance. They were both light-skinned and husky, with blond hair and big blue eyes. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the possibility that John the bully wasn’t his dad was almost impossible. Yet, even so, their bond was no more than a biological one, and they had nothing between them worth feeling sorrow for. That man was single-handedly responsible for his sister’s mental state and was the reason he left home. Jeff couldn’t feel any compassion for him. As far as Jeff was concerned, the man he called his father could croak.

  “And Mom?” he continued asking.

  “I-I t-t-think s-s-she’s sad b-because of him.”

  “And you, Sis, what’s going on with you? Why is your stammer worse?”

  “I-I d-d-don’t know. E-ever since my t-t-teeth were broken, it j-j-just g-g-got w-w-worse.”

  Her stammer had become heavy, to a point that completing a full sentence took a long time. In the beginning, he listened to her patiently, but as the conversation grew longer, he became impatient and started cutting her off, completing her sentences and waiting for her confirmation. It seemed she sensed that because, at the end of the conversation, she said, “It’s hard for me to talk. It’s better that you write to me.” And Jeff did as she requested.

  In the beginning, his letters were answered, but as time passed, her letters became far and few between, and then they stopped altogether, leaving him agonized with worry. He decided that in the spring, he’d take a few days off and go visit her and his mother.

  The loneliness that was his lot at night grew worse in the winter. That was when he acutely felt the absence of a woman. And it wasn’t that he didn’t have opportunities. The opposite was true. On his first day on the job, the chubby, smiling secretary who greeted him and wrote down his personal details, asked him out on a date, but he rejected her politely. Then, Rico offered to introduce him to one of his family members, Laura, “a world-class beauty,” he said. “Puerto Rican girls will eat you alive,” he added with a wink, and Jeff gave in.

  Rico was right. Laura did “eat him alive” on their first date, but she didn’t capture his heart. After several dates, he realized she wasn’t what his heart desired. And there was also the cute, nice girl he met every morning at the bus station on the way to work. They greeted each other with a good morning while they waited together for the bus. Once, she even sat next to him and started a conversation. She asked what he did and where he lived, but beyond that, nothing happened. Maybe something will happen, Jeff thought each morning, when he got off the bus and said good-bye to her. But he didn’t make his move, and one morning, he arrived at the bus station and to his regret, she wasn’t there. The feeling of missed opportunity followed him for days.

  Sometimes he thought about Ellen. Ellen was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee, who worked with him at the diner at Eloy. She also relieved him of his virginity when he was seventeen. Now, he yearningly recalled her voluptuous body, her large breasts, and her pouty lips, which sucked eagerly on his tongue. Even Ellen, a woman whom he didn’t even love, became the object of his desire during those lonely nights. He imagined curling in her arms, while she wrapped him in the heat of her soft body, scattering kisses all over him.

  The yearning for a woman’s body didn’t abate, so he called Laura the man-eater again. She rejected him. Desperate, he ordered a woman off one of those websites. The sexual encounter calmed him a bit, but the sum she demanded, one hundred and fifty dollars, forced him to waive services destined for horny men.

  Among all these women, there was one mysterious girl. Not a girl, but a real woman, probably several years older than himself, perhaps even married. He saw her only once, at the end of summer, when he cleaned the windows in the enormous building where she worked.

  “Millions of dollars are made in this building,” Rico declared importantly.

  “What’s so special about it, besides its size?” Jeff asked.

  “Oh, I wish you and me could walk into the joint. These are the offices of the largest brokerage firm in the world. Which means, they only invest for people who have at least a million bucks. Get it? A million bucks,” Rico replied. After a brief pause, he added jokingly, “And I, Rico, am short of only one dollar to enter the gates of this building.”

  “Here, take a dollar to make up what you’re missing,” Jeff laughed. Then he sighed and said, “A fictional sum that I’ll never in my life have. Come on, bro, back to reality. Let’s go up to the roof. Otherwise, we won’t have money to eat.”

  They collected their work tools and hurried to the elevator that led them straight to the roof of the building.

  “And that’s nothing,” Rico stated,
while he helped secure Jeff in the contraption. “Wait until we clean the windows of the Twin Towers. Then you’ll see a real skyscraper! Those two are concrete monsters that will endure for another million years,” Rico said and whistled appreciatively as he helped Jeff shimmy down.

  Jeff moved from window to window, until he reached the window on the sixty-second floor, where he saw her. While he meticulously polished the glass with a rag, he noticed her in her luxurious office. In the beginning, she was on the phone and didn’t notice him. She clacked on her keyboard while constantly talking on the phone. But then she gazed at the window, finally noticing him. In the beginning, she glanced at him without much interest. After a while, she looked at him again, and since, didn’t take her eyes off of him and followed his work in amazement. For a moment, he thought she was gesturing with her hand that he come in, but that was impossible since the window was sealed shut. From his vantage point, he noticed her shapely body and her beauty. A moment before he finished the window, she suddenly abandoned her desk and approached the window, examining him closely with her large green eyes, and signaling something with her hand that he didn’t understand. His breath hitched, to a point where he could hardly wave at her. And then, the harness in which he sat, lifted and quickly carried him to the next window.

  The amazing woman disappeared.

  After that brief, strange encounter, Jeff thought a lot about that woman, and mostly pondered how he’d meet her again. He amused himself with the thought that if he had a million dollars, he would go to her and ask her to invest them for him, thus gaining the opportunity to meet her again. And actually, why not? Granted, he had only seven thousand dollars that he’d painstakingly saved up, but weren’t they enough to request investment consultation? When he met her again, he’d ask her where to invest the money, and maybe, who knows, she’d give him some good advice. He’d already heard about people who turned a thousand dollars into a million in less than ten years. And if he was lucky, he’d have, if not five million dollars, then at least fifty thousand. Just thinking about that sum excited him greatly.

  All through the first months of winter, his thoughts jumbled in his head: sorrow for his sister, the money he may earn, and the desire for a woman. Mostly, his longing for the mysterious woman from the window on the sixty-second floor. And then, just when it seemed as though nothing would happen, it did.

  One day, at the height of winter, Jeff and two other workers were summoned for urgent repairs in a fancy building in the heart of Manhattan. When they arrived at the building first thing in the morning, a uniformed doorman received them.

  He led them to the area by the elevator.

  “Who’s in charge?” he asked.

  “I am,” said Jeff, who had the most seniority and experience.

  “The door’s broken, and you have to change its hinges.” The doorman pointed at the door leading to the stairwell next to the elevator. Then he added, “And in the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floor, the ceiling plaster is crumbling. It needs a new coat of plaster and paint.”

  Jeff chose to fix the door next to the elevator and instructed the other two workers to fix the ceiling in the stairwell. He kneeled and took out his work tools, just as he heard the ding of the elevator, which stopped at the ground floor. The elevator door slid open. He heard the rap of high heels as the woman wearing them emerged from the elevator. Jeff raised his eyes to her and recognized her immediately—the beautiful woman from the sixty-second floor! She wore a short, red skirt that showed off long, shapely legs sheathed in black stockings. Through her white shirt, he could see a blue lace bra.

  For a second, he thought their eyes had met. But maybe not? Perhaps, she hadn’t even noticed him? To his disappointment, she emerged from the elevator and hastened her steps as she walked toward the exit. Had she not noticed him? Or maybe she did and chose to ignore him? Jeff concluded resignedly that she had, but apparently, his presence hadn’t left any impression on her. And why should such a beautiful, rich woman show interest in him? Why would she be interested in a poor, uneducated guy like himself? She was probably married, and if not, she probably had many suitors, all of them rich, wealthy men from mid-Manhattan. In their previous encounter, she seemed to show interest, especially when she approached the window, and it seemed as though she had wanted to say something to him. But that had happened so briefly, just a fraction of a second before he moved on to clean the nearby window. The entire matter was just a figment of his imagination and nothing more, he concluded sorrowfully. People see what they wish to see, and to prove it, she had just passed by him, so close he could’ve touched her, and she hadn’t even noticed him.

  Reeling from the intensity of the encounter, he could barely turn his head to follow her rapidly disappearing image. Yet, then he saw something unexpected. He watched her cross the threshold and leave the building, already resigning himself to the fact he would never see her again, when she stopped. It looked as though she were hesitating, reconsidering something, deliberating whether to continue or turn back. In the end, she turned around and retraced her steps, until she stood two meters from him. Jeff lifted his head and stared at her in wonder, unable to hide his amazement at her beauty, which was even more astounding from up-close. He straightened slowly and looked straight at her, filling his lungs with her intoxicating scent. She stared at him as well. They looked at each other for one long minute, without a word.

  “Hello,” he finally managed, with no little difficulty, to say, breaking the awkward silence. “You’re the lady from the investment firm, right? I cleaned your window last summer.”

  “Right,” she whispered, having a hard time hiding the flush in her cheeks.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked.

  Not only did she remember his handsome face, but she also longed for the day she’d meet him again. “Oh, I remember,” she replied shyly, surprised at herself. She’d never been shy before in the company of the opposite sex, not even as a teenager.

  “Nice to meet you. Jeff.” He extended a hand that was shaking from yearning and stress.

  “Nice to meet you. Eve,” she replied and shook his hand with one that was just as shaky. Then she smiled, and he smiled back.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked even though she wasn’t.

  “Never mind,” she said, and suddenly her expression became serious. “When you have time, I have a table at home that requires some fixing up. Can you do that for me?” She remembered that her dinner table had one loose leg, and was glad to find an excuse to meet the cute guy again. She hoped good things would result from that future meeting, certainly better than the excited, ridiculous adolescent encounter they were having now.

  “Yeah, sure,” he replied happily.

  “Great,” she said, her eyes shining.

  “And then you can help me.” He remembered his original plan. “I have a small sum of money, and I don’t know what to do with it. I was told you’re an investment advisor. Would you be willing to recommend a fitting investment for me?”

  Eve smiled in satisfaction. She took out a business card and gave it to Jeff. “Call whenever you want to meet…”

  Jeff was sure he heard a note of seduction in her voice. A strangely delightful feeling encompassed him, a feeling he’d never felt before. He shoved the card into his wallet and returned to his tool box. At the end of the workday, just before he left the building, he approached the mailboxes in the foyer. On the mailbox of apartment seventy-two, he found her name: Eve Klein.

  Chapter 5

  A heavy silence descended on the Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The synagogue goers had gone home and left the street silent and abandoned. The relentlessly falling rain took a short break. Only the many puddles were a silent testimony to the heavy rains that fell only minutes before. Dim beams of light shed by the street lamps glittered in the big puddles and induced a mystical atmosphere. The somewhat murky water seemed to conceal a mystery that no one had yet discovered.

  Jeff w
alked quickly between the puddles on his way to Ahron’s house, which was about twenty blocks from his basement apartment. He had wrapped up in warm clothes and took advantage of the brief dry spell. Despite the considerable distance and the overcast weather, he chose to forego the subway or bus. Usually, he didn’t walk a lot, but it was the Shabbat, and he knew that traveling on a Shabbat was forbidden by the Jews.

  It was another one of his many visits to his friend’s house. Recently, his visits to Ahron had become even more frequent, and their friendship grew stronger. They met or talked on the phone almost every day. Even now, as he started walking faster because of the intense cold, he pondered for the hundredth time about the odd relationship between himself and the amiable young Jew, who was seemingly so different from him. Both of them were of almost similar height, and both had big blue eyes, yet apart from that, they were almost entirely different. Ahron’s complexion was pale, and compared to Jeff’s tanned face, he looked even paler. Ahron was skinny and fragile, while Jeff was lean and muscular. But their main difference was in their attire and hairstyle. Ahron was always meticulously dressed in a white button-down shirt and black slacks, while Jeff dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts. Ahron’s head was shaved, while a golden mane covered Jeff’s head. To those looking at them from the side, the differences seemed vast. They didn’t even have common recreations. Their friendship was based mainly on the heart-to-heart conversations they held. More than once, Jeff wondered whether the fact that he lived by himself caused Ahron and his wife to invite him over as their guest, or perhaps his presence in their house really was important to them. He couldn’t find a clear-cut answer. He didn’t even concern himself with the question whether a Jew was permitted to have a gentile as his guest on the Shabbat evening.