“Icaro Lagan, Wendy Lagan, this is Sharon Berg.”
“Sharon?” Icaro pronounced the “r” with a rolling trill, inevitably bringing Rabbi Joachim to mind. Unlike the rabbi, however, Icaro shook her hand warmly and looked her in the eye as he did so.
“Wendy...”
“Nice to meet you. And this is Allie,” Wendy said, holding out the dog for Sharon to pet.
So this woman in the oversized, gray flannel sweatshirt with the hole in the shoulder and the faded jeans owned the Beetle. As always, Sharon had overdressed for the occasion. Even in her stylish flat-heeled ballerina slippers (so as not to look too much taller than Junior), her stockings and full city regalia—handbag, crocheted summer gloves, scarf and earrings—it was Sharon who came off looking awkward. Despite Wendy’s shabby outfit, she was too pretty to compete with. Sharon excused herself and headed for her usual refuge—the toilet. Once inside the tiny white cubbyhole with the lidless toilet seat and the patch-in-the-wall window, she washed her hands and face and dried them with a rough paper towel from a pile on the sink. Finding no wastebasket, she dropped the crumpled towel into the toilet bowl, flushed it down, and, pulling up her wrinkled panty hose from the waistband, checked her face in the mirror: rouged cheeks made even redder by the towel rub; blue eyes glistening with unnatural ardor for a twenty-eight-year-old goy who, in approximately seven hours, would be mounting her. Hearing voices outside the door, Sharon took a deep breath before leaving the toilet.
On emerging, she heard Wendy breathlessly explaining to Junior that she’d rushed right to the hospital from her riding lesson, where she’d lost a stirrup and landed flat on her rump in the dust, and had had no time to go home and change her clothes. Watching her as she talked, Sharon anxiously noted that Wendy wasn’t just pretty but beautiful, small and delicately boned with green eyes and thick red-gold hair that she wore plaited over her ears into a low bun tucked behind her graceful flower stalk of a neck.
Icaro laughed and patted his wife’s head consolingly. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was over forty and Wendy was only in her twenties. The age difference between them was greater than that between Sharon and Junior. But Icaro was a man—and a doctor to boot. Junior had only introduced her as Sharon Berg. What else had he told his friends about her? That she was a secretary? A Kabbalah student?
“Icaro taught me Spanish,” Wendy said, handing her husband the dog before turning to a wall locker behind her and removing a gallon-sized cooler. “And I taught him English. We both did so well at it that we decided to prolong the language course and get married.”
“Don’t believe her,” said Icaro, putting the leash on the dog. He removed his white coat and handed it to Wendy, who stored it in the locker. “I only married her for her body. You know these legendary, sexy American nurses.” Somehow, coming from Icaro, with his rolled “r” and his laughable handlebar mustache, the remark didn’t come across as sexist.
“Here, I’ll get it,” Junior took the cooler.
“I like your dog,” Sharon said, edging closer to Wendy, who, in the brief span of their meeting, had elicited an unpleasant childhood recollection also involving a dog. Wendy was now provoking the same turbulent mixture of rage and desire to maim her perfect beauty.
“What’s your doggie’s name?” Sharon had asked upon meeting the little girl walking her dog on a late winter afternoon. Dressed all in pink, amazed that the older girl had deigned to talk to her, the child had shaken her long red curls under her peaked cap and submissively, or out of friendliness—Sharon was not sure which—handed her the dog’s leash.
“His name’s Fluffy. Here, you wanna walk him for a while?”
They’d walked on together, Sharon holding the dog’s leash in one hand and the child’s mittened hand in the other.
“Your mommy lets you walk the dog alone so late?”
“Just today; Toby went to her Girl Scout meeting and Mommy has company, so there was nobody home to do it but me.”
They had neared the subway station then and were approaching a little hole-in-the-wall candy store, a favorite with the neighborhood children for its gargantuan comic book displays, its long zinc soda bar, and its nearsighted, easygoing proprietor, Mr. Fort, who’d let them read the comic books without buying and occasionally handed out free pencil holders at the beginning of the school year.
“Do you like Pickup Sticks?” Overwhelmed by an unfamiliar tide of generosity, Sharon had wanted to buy something for the child.
The little girl had been puzzled but let herself be led into the store.
On credit, for she had no money with her, Sharon had bought a long tube of blue and yellow magnetic Pickup Sticks—the most expensive kind—and given it to the little girl.
“Thank you,” the trusting child had again taken her hand and walked with her out of the candy store.
“Let’s go to my house and try them out.” Gripped by an impulse that brought fear to her stomach and bile to her throat, Sharon hadn’t waited for an answer but had gone home with both child and dog in tow.
The Kellners were then living in the Midwood section of Brooklyn in a small red brick, two-family house whose front hall door was hung with curtains and could be locked from the inside. Pinnie was working as a manicurist in a beauty salon on Flatbush Avenue. Her father, Sharon thought, might be with his “woman,” the black-haired creature she heard her parents arguing over at night when she was supposed to be sleeping. Breathing heavily, she’d slung the dog’s leash over the doorknob after locking the door, tossed off her parka and removed the little girl’s coat.
“Let’s stay here, it’s cozier, don’t you think?” she said, sitting down with the child and the dog on the living room floor. Opening the tube, she tossed the Pickup Sticks onto the carpet. The radiator hissed, and the child, now openly frightened, began to whimper.
“Oh, don’t be such a fraidy cat,” Sharon said, placing her cold hand against the girl’s warm neck under her silky red curls.
“I want to go home! I want my mommy!”
The dog now began to howl so loud that Sharon had to cover her ears. It was a crazy, stupid thing to have done, bringing the girl home, and when people heard about it—for surely the little girl would hurry off first thing and blab to her mother and her sister Toby about it—and the child’s mother might choose to press charges and have Sharon expelled from school or even worse, placed in juvenile detention. Her friends would throw her out of their club for molesting Toby’s little sister and titter behind their hands as she walked past them on her way to see her counselor. She’d be friendless and alone forever. Her father would be so ashamed of her that he’d never so much as look at her again. Enraged as the enormity of her as yet uncommitted crime loomed before her in the lengthening evening shadows beyond the curtained door, Sharon joined the howling dog and the child and began to cry, too. “Damn you, damn you!” she screamed at the little girl, who had tears and snot running down her chin. Then, roughly pulling up the little girl by the arm and quickly slipping her back into her coat, Sharon had unwound the dog’s leash, opened the door, and sent her on her way.
Miraculously, no one had ever found out about it. After a while, Sharon herself believed what she’d done that afternoon to be a dream or a raging fantasy entertained at the sight of all that pinkness and innocence.
Whatever the evil thing had been, it eventually loosened its grip on her. She’d even forgotten it—until the brush and feel of the child-woman Wendy colliding with her in the hospital corridor brought it rushing back so powerfully it almost knocked her over.
“People eat dogs in Korea,” Icaro was saying as they walked down the stairs and through the Lysol-smelling corridors, once again surrounded by the army of limbless and broken men. “I saved Allie from the casserole, you might say.”
“Oh, honey, it wasn’t all that dramatic; how you love to exaggerate.” Wendy playfully slapped her husband’s butt.
Spurred by the affectionate display of his friends,
Junior pulled Sharon close to him when they were seated in the back of the car. Her heart banging against her ribs, Sharon wondered if she wasn’t falling in love with him after all.
IT WAS AN IDEAL PICNIC, RIGHT OUT OF A MOVIE. No, even better, because Sharon was participating in it herself rather than longing for it from the wrong side of a lonely late-night television screen. Searching for a way to make it last—the shady grove of trees, their laughter melting into the wind, everything so green, so green, even the wine bottles glinting in the sun—despite Rabbi Joachim’s warning against clinging to the “fugitive pleasures of the flesh”—Sharon wished she could restrain the fleeting moment, catch it in her fist and hold it forever. As the sun descended and the talk grew livelier, she even let Junior Cantana put his arm around her in full view of the Lagans—though that might have resulted from her three glasses of champagne. You know that drinking wine with gentiles is forbidden because it might lead to intermarriage, Rabbi Joachim’s astral voice intruded. Icaro had opened another bottle of champagne. Sharon held out her glass and let him fill it to the top. All she needed was another sip, and the rabbi would stop haranguing her.
Wendy’s plaid cooler was filled with random delicacies: a minuscule jar of black caviar; a variety of biscuits; a pungent wheel of orange cheese that was not cheddar but whose name escaped Wendy for the moment; organic purple grapes; brandied peaches; champagne; and a chocolate cake Wendy had baked herself. She seemed to have tossed in whatever had come to mind. Yet despite her childlike disregard for practicality, Wendy had remembered to bring plastic knives, forks, spoons and glasses, and paper plates, along with a set of richly embossed linen napkins, a wedding gift, as she put it, “from one of Icaro’s diamond-studded Colombian aunts.” She’d even included a Frisbee and a Scrabble set and a small cassette player.
“Icaro loves American jazz. He simply has to have blues wherever he goes. Isn’t this cake delicious? I’m going to have another piece.” Wendy cut herself a large slice of chocolate cake and licked her fingers.
“Watch it, or you’ll get fat, like your mother, maybe. No, heaven forbid, what am I saying?” Icaro rolled his eyes in mock horror. “You should see this woman, she’s an elephant!”
Wendy slapped him on the hand, spilling some of his champagne.
“Tiene. enough, little devil! She’s impossible, my wife, but I love her anyway. You love her, too, Sharon, yes?” Icaro bent forward and peered, smiling, into Sharon’s eyes. “I can tell. She is impossible, an elf, a perpetual child, but everyone love her anyway.” Tipsy, Icaro forgot his English.
“Some elf,” Junior said. Covering the opening with a napkin, he freed the cork from the last champagne bottle with a dull, popping noise. “That ‘eternal child,’ I’ll have you know...”
“Perpetual child, I said perpetual,” Icaro corrected him, exaggeratedly rolling his Rs.
“Okay, perpetual,” Junior said, imitating Icaro’s Latin trill and waving his napkin in the air. “That elf over there is entering medical school a month from now.”
Sharon tried to imagine what was expected of her—a curtsy? What to say without betraying her envy?
Wendy leapt up from the blanket and tossed the Frisbee high in the air. “Come on, all, come join me before the sun goes down and it’s too late to play!”
“I’m—I’m impressed,” Sharon said finally, slipping off her shoes, and noticing a large, unsightly hole in her stocking and her big toe sticking out.
“All my inspiration, of course,” Icaro said, indifferent to Sharon’s predicament. “My wife is a perfectly good nurse as it is, but we plan to return to Colombia to work together. Where I intend to practice, I’ll need an associate, someone who can perform surgery and prescribe her own medicines.”
“They’re going to work in the jungle, near the Amazon,” Junior said.
“Are you playing Frisbee or not?” Accompanied by a spirited classical Spanish guitar piece on the cassette player, Wendy danced over to the blanket and aimed the Frisbee directly at the champagne bottle. The dog was furiously digging a hole alongside her.
“I’ll play if it’ll keep you from knocking over the champagne,” Junior got up and beckoned for Wendy to toss him the Frisbee. “Anyone else?” He looked down at Sharon, clearly eager for her to join him. Sharon was too intent on hiding the offending hole in her stocking to respond, and sat busily stacking used paper plates and cups and throwing them into an oversized trash bag.
“You don’t have to play,” said Icaro. “Stay here and talk to me.”
“Yes,” Sharon said, “you play, Junior. I’ll clean up, it’s getting late.” Unthinkingly slipping into her motherly role, she’d almost called him “Paulie.”
Icaro was watching her closely, with a half smile on his lips. “So you are the martyr type,” he said holding open the trash bag for Sharon as Junior returned Wendy’s toss high over her head eliciting shrieks and mock threats of revenge.
Deliberately returning Icaro’s insult with one of her own, Sharon said pettishly, “She almost looks too young for med school.”
“Yes, she hides her brilliance under that playful little girl’s mask—but she’ll make a better doctor than I am. Intelligence was not much prized in her family—not for women, anyway. The mother is a rich widow out in Ohio—I only saw her once in my life, at the Philadelphia airport. She flew in to meet me after Wendy and I had married. The three of us had a stiff drink and a stiff conversation, and she flew right back home. She’s probably disowned Wendy by now; but we haven’t heard from her in a couple of years. Wendy was not supposed to have become a nurse. She was not supposed to join the army, and she certainly, so her mother thought, had no business marrying a foreigner.”
“Don’t you come from a wealthy family yourself?” Sharon suppressed a hiccup and noticed a sliver of moon hidden behind a scudding cloud. It would grow dark soon and a full moon the color of a new nickel would come out of hiding.
“My father is wealthy, but not me. I am a Communist,” Icaro said proudly thumping himself on the chest. “You know, the Garcia Marquez variety—he’s Colombian, too.”
“Who?” Sharon shivered. It had turned colder now that the sun was setting. “Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
Resentful of Icaro for testing her, Sharon shrugged and said, “Oh, him. I’ve never been a great fan of magical realism.”
Ignoring the offhanded dismissal of his compatriot, Icaro leaned back and half closed his eyes. “Yes, that is my plan, to go home to Colombia, and make things better for the poor people in my country.” He paused, then stood up and stuffed the remains of their beautiful picnic further into the sack in order to make room for the empty champagne bottles. Allie had stopped digging holes and was lying prone on the ground, alert and sniffing the air as if testing for rain.
From the corner of her eye, Sharon watched the light-footed Wendy scramble for the Frisbee. Junior, in the shadows now, seemed to be beckoning her. Sharon had missed the rest of Icaro’s sentence. The testiness between them had dissipated and he was now telling her, very amiably, about his internship in the primitive Colombian mountain country, of surgeries performed in graveyards, of starving babies with blue noses and huge swollen bellies—painting Sharon’s own worst nightmares in the bright colors of his “Communist ideals”—going on about his hopes for the future of his country, his admiration for his atypical American wife, who had been accepted by Tufts University Medical School for the coming term—despite her late application, and her being a married woman. Wasn’t Wendy amazing, he asked rhetorically, not waiting for Sharon’s reply. And then, before she could nod benignly and signal her agreement—yes, Wendy was fantastic, a new Mother Teresa in the making—Icaro suddenly interrupted himself and said, “God, how I love that woman. My kindest wish for my good friend Junior is that you and he are as happy as we are after you marry.”
It was surely Latino overstatement, or maybe, the champagne, or the overwhelming surge of love Icaro was feeling for his wife just th
en. But no, for when Sharon pretended not to hear his last remark, he continued, “You are a fine couple, you will be happy together, I know. Maybe you will even come to live and work in my country and be—how do you call it?” Icaro gazed up among the trees and twirled his fingers searching for the lost word. “Ah, yes, neighbors, good neighbors and friends.”
“You’re running ahead of yourself, Icaro. Junior and I hardly know each other. We met less than a month ago, sitting on a bench in Coney Island.”
“Where is that place, somewhere in New York City?” he scowled, looking like a well-meaning gnome.
Why was this stranger with the handlebar moustache asking her these personal questions? She’d only met him and his “elfin” wife a few hours ago. They meant nothing to her.
Yapping, the dog jumped up and circled the legs of his returning mistress.
“I know for a fact that he is in love with you,” Icaro went on hurriedly, as if it were important to deliver this information to her before Junior and Wendy returned. “He told me so himself. As for time, why do you think of time? Love is stronger than time,” he finished sententiously, shaking the crumbs from the green army blanket and whistling for the dog to come and eat the few remaining scraps of food from his hand.
Only love is stronger than death, Rabbi Joachim whispered through the trees.
Help me, Rabbi, I am looking for the right man to love, the right life! But Sharon’s plea was lost in the rustle of the leaves.
The Kabbalah Master Page 14