by Anne Raeff
“I’m not up for it quite yet,” Leo said, and Ulli didn’t insist.
“Of course. When you feel up to it,” she said, and she did not notice that Leo had turned toward the window, where there was a cardinal perched on the ledge, watching them.
Sometimes Ulli woke up in the middle of the night and lay awake for a while just listening to Leo’s quiet, even breathing, the breathing of a man with a new heart, and she allowed herself to think, then, that she was happy, but she did not let herself dwell on it, on this happiness. Now, as she lay on Isaac’s bed in her hotel, she shook off the memory of a happiness that had once been, for there is nothing more painful than the memory of happiness. But Isaac was here now, and though he had stirred it all up again, she was not displeased that he had come. It had been too long since someone had demanded more of her than hospitality.
Leo had grown stronger. He spent most of his afternoons sitting on the same bench in Central Park. The sun, he felt, did him good, warmed his bones, which had been cold with fear, he realized, ever since the doctor suggested the valve replacement. When he first came home from the hospital, he worried about the business and checked in with his partner several times a day. Once he was able to go outside, however, he grew lax, and days would go by before he called in for an update, which was always the same—everything was great.
When he felt even stronger, he started taking the girls to the park with him—though not all the time, for he liked being alone—and the three of them rode the carousel on the same horse, as neither Simone nor Juliet was old enough to ride by herself. “Soon,” he told Simone, “you will be able to have your own pony.”
“I don’t want my own pony,” Simone said.
“Why not?”
“I might fall,” she said.
“Not if you hold on tight,” he said.
“What if I can’t?” she asked.
“You will,” he said.
“I will try,” Simone said. “I won’t be scared. I promise.”
“You can be scared and still do it,” Leo said. “I was scared when I went into the hospital, but I did it.”
“That’s because you’re brave,” Simone said.
“But you don’t have to ride your own pony just yet,” Leo said. “There’s still time.”
“Good,” Simone said, lifting her head to the breeze. When they were back in the apartment under the watchful guidance of Mrs. Donny, Leo wondered whether he had told Simone the right thing.
On one of the days that he did not take the girls with him—when he was feeling particularly strong, could feel not only the even beat of his new heart but the blood circulating through his veins like a kind river—he decided to explore the park, and he branched off from the main road to one of the minor dirt paths that ran through the trees. He found, as the trees grew thicker, that he was whistling, noting that he didn’t really whistle much anymore, so he started singing. He was singing “Henrietta’s Wedding” when he saw the man leaning against a tree, one hand deep in his pocket, and then he saw that there were more men—together—in the cover of the trees. Leo stopped walking and singing, but they had already scurried deeper into the woods like cockroaches when you turn on the light. It was so quiet, he could hear them breathing. He wanted to tell them that he would not hurt them, that he of all people would not hurt them, but he ran instead, though it was still too soon for running. He ran back to his bench and wiped the surface with his handkerchief before sitting down, something he never did, just to make it seem that he had not been running at all, though everyone had seen him, holding on to his hat, his jacket flapping. He sat on his bench, trying to collect his thoughts, taking his pulse as the doctor had told him to do, but he could not concentrate because someone sat down next to him, though there were plenty of free benches all around.
“Are you okay?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Leo said without looking toward him.
“I thought maybe you’d been robbed.”
“No,” he said.
The man did not answer, but he did not get up.
Leo’s heart would not slow down. In fact it seemed to be beating faster now than when he first sat down, though he couldn’t be certain, for he knew that if he timed his pulse, the man would say something like, So you’re not okay, because if you were, you wouldn’t be taking your pulse.
“Did something frighten you?”
“No,” Leo said emphatically, too emphatically, but it was said and he could not take it back.
“Good,” the man said.
What if he had done damage to the valve, ripped it out of place? But he would feel that, the blood overflowing the banks. Be brave, he said to himself, be brave. He turned to look at the man, but he was gone.
He did not remember walking home, did not remember stopping for a traffic light or riding in the elevator. Once he was inside and had gone straight to the bedroom, pulled the drapes, burrowed into the safety of his bed, refused Mrs. Donny’s offer of tea and melba toast, her remedy for all ailments, he was not sure that any of it had been real—the men like trees in a forest, the man on the bench. What he really wanted was a drink, but he knew Mrs. Donny wouldn’t allow it. She had her orders. He had his orders, so the only escape was sleep, but he couldn’t sleep, even with the curtains drawn, even with the door closed and the girls being extra quiet as Mrs. Donny admonished them to be because their daddy was not feeling well. “Is it his heart?” he had heard Simone ask.
Leo didn’t hear Mrs. Donny’s answer.
Eventually he did fall asleep, and he awoke hours later to the smell of smoke. The room was dark now, and Ulli was there, lying on the bed next to him in her work clothes. “What time is it?” he asked.
“Late.”
“How late?”
“Past midnight.”
“How long have you been lying there?”
“For a while.”
“I got scared,” Leo said.
“I know,” she said. “But everything’s fine. Feel it,” she said, pressing his fingers to his wrist. “Can you feel it?”
And he could feel it, his heart, beating as it was supposed to beat, steadily, in time with the clock at his bedside ticking off the seconds, the seconds that made minutes that made hours and days and weeks, months and years, all the years that he had left to live with his guaranteed-for-one-hundred-years valve. “Yes,” he said. “I can feel it.”
That night, they made love for the first time since his surgery. “Are you okay?” Ulli asked as soon as they were finished.
“Yes,” he said.
They lay in the dark in each other’s arms without speaking. It had begun to rain, and the smell of water wafted in through the open window. “I went to the park today,” Leo said. He wanted to say more.
The next day, despite the doctor’s orders, Leo went back to work. His heart could not bear all this resting any longer. It was time to be productive.
Oliver
During Leo’s convalescence Howard had telephoned regularly, offering his services, his friendship. “Mrs. Donny takes good care of me,” Leo told Howard, assuring him that as soon as he felt strong enough, he would love to meet for lunch. Howard never questioned Leo’s excuses, and Leo was grateful to Howard for not making a scene, for not showing up at the apartment unannounced.
Leo had not wanted to hurt Howard, but after the convalescence he was busy getting back into the swing of things, and the business was expanding, always expanding, taking over more and more territory, like a peaceful army bringing protection instead of death and destruction.
Eventually Howard wrote Leo a letter—eleven pages of minuscule, often illegible letters that seemed to belong to a different, long-forgotten alphabet. But Leo got the gist of it. Howard loved him, had loved him since he first set eyes on him. Leo had broken his heart. It was signed thus: Come to me, my Leo.
L
eo sent the following reply, not on a card but at the very top of a white, unlined piece of paper: I am sorry.
Howard did not reply, and Leo worried that Howard would do something desperate, so every few weeks Leo went to the Upper West Side to make sure Howard was still there, was still pulling the gate shut at the end of the day, glancing back over his shoulder one last time to make sure everything was in order before walking away. Leo was sure that one day he would have the courage to walk into the store to apologize, but he never did, and most of the time he believed that he was being kind, that it was best for Howard not to see him, not to start believing that maybe there was hope for his own heart, that maybe with Leo he would have another chance at love. And then, not even a month after he had gone back to work, Leo met Oliver.
It was because of Isaac that Leo met Oliver, though it wasn’t Isaac’s idea in the same way that meeting Ulli had been. It was Isaac who had gotten the tickets to see Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall without checking in with Ulli about her travel schedule, which meant that he and Leo had to go to the concert without her. Leo had wanted to sell the extra ticket when they got to the concert, but instead Isaac gave it to one of his colleagues, who also ended up not being able to attend and who, in turn, gave it to his friend, a clarinetist.
Oliver was already there when Leo and Isaac arrived at their seats. “You must be Isaac,” he said, getting up and clasping Leo’s hand in his.
“I’m Leo,” Leo said. “That’s Isaac,” he said, turning toward Isaac.
“Isaac.” Oliver leaned over Leo and, embarrassed by his mistake, shook his hand in a more formal way. Then he offered to pay for the ticket.
“Don’t be absurd,” Isaac said.
“Well, thank you, then,” Oliver said. “It’s very generous of you.”
Leo ended up in the middle, with Isaac on his right and Oliver on his left. They talked briefly about how Oliver knew the professor to whom Isaac had originally given the ticket. Later that night, after Isaac had left Leo and Oliver at the bar where they had gone, upon Oliver’s insistence, for a drink after the concert, after Leo had told Oliver about his heart and Ulli and the girls, when they were lying in bed in Oliver’s apartment on West End Avenue listening to Artie Shaw—the world’s greatest clarinetist, according to Oliver, even though he had given up on the instrument and escaped to Spain, leaving only silence—Oliver told Leo that until the moment Isaac stood up and announced that he was going home, he had assumed that Isaac and Leo were lovers.
“Don’t be absurd,” Leo said, and Oliver laughed.
“And during intermission, as you were navigating the row, squeezing by the knees of the people who were seated, Isaac lost his balance for a moment and steadied himself by putting his hand on your shoulder. If you could have seen yourselves, you would have thought the same thing.”
“I guess it’s because we’ve known each other for a long time. We were in the war together,” Leo said, but he did not want to talk about war that night, that first night with Oliver. There would be time for all that. He knew there would be, and he knew, after Oliver played “All of Me,” standing naked in the bedroom, his eyes half closed, as if the sound of the music were visible, as if it were too bright, too raw and beautiful to look at head-on, there would be plenty of time to tell Oliver everything. On that first night with Oliver he wanted only to lie there with him and not think about everything he would eventually tell him and about the fact that soon he would have to get up, put on his clothes, and go out into the night to his apartment, where Mrs. Donny was keeping watch over his children.
He kept Oliver a secret until one muggy summer evening when Ulli was out of town and Isaac stopped by without calling first. After they had finished the quart of pistachio ice cream that Isaac had brought and the girls were in bed, Isaac and Leo sat in the living room with the windows wide open, hoping for a breeze, drinking Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.
“Things cannot go on this way,” Isaac said, jiggling the ice in his drink as he always did.
“What things?” Leo asked.
“Whatever it is that’s making Ulli miserable,” Isaac said.
“Did she tell you she’s unhappy?”
“She doesn’t have to tell me, Leo,” Isaac said.
Of course he knew, Isaac, his goddamn conscience.
“Even the girls know something is wrong,” Isaac added.
“How do you know that?”
“Simone told me that when she gets up in the middle of the night, she finds you asleep on the couch. She says she watches you sleep.”
“She gets up in the middle of the night?”
“She’s very quiet, walks on her tippy toes.”
“How long has this been going on?” Leo asked.
“A while.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was a secret. Simone made me promise not to tell.”
But Leo suspected that it was Isaac who had wanted to keep it a secret, hoping, perhaps, that if no one intervened, things would get so bad between him and Ulli that they would separate and Ulli would come running to Isaac, who would, Isaac believed, love her forever and never leave her, never betray her as he had done.
“So why are you telling me now?” Leo asked.
“I’m telling you because I want to help,” Isaac said. He did not say that he could not bear to think of Simone waking up in the middle of the night with that feeling in her gut that something was wrong, that what she had held as true—her parents’ love for each other—might not be a truth at all. “Why don’t I take them this weekend, so you and Ulli can talk.”
“I don’t think so,” Leo said.
“You have to tell her,” Isaac said. “That’s a beginning.”
“I don’t know how to begin,” Leo said.
“Is it Oliver?” Isaac asked.
“Yes,” Leo said.
“I knew it,” Isaac said sadly, as if he had sensed that someone he cared about had died and now it had been confirmed.
“It’s different this time, with Oliver.”
“Different from what?”
“From the others.”
“There have been others?”
“They didn’t mean anything.”
“Not Bidor? He didn’t mean anything?”
“No, I mean, yes, he meant something. He was the first.”
“If only you had left Ulli alone,” Isaac said.
“But I loved her. I did, I do.”
“That is not love,” Isaac said.
“What do you know about love?” Leo asked.
Isaac set his glass down on the coaster and walked to the door, where he paused, turned toward Leo, and said, “You must tell her.”
“I’m sorry,” Leo said, but Isaac had already pulled the door shut, gently, the way he did when he closed the door to the girls’ room after looking in on them.
Ulli came home a few days later, and on Saturday she and Leo dropped the girls off at Isaac’s. Once they were back home, once they had poured drinks and were sitting across from each other at the dining room table, where Leo had insisted they sit because the sofa was too soft, like water, he began with Bidor. He told Ulli about the night, the desert, the moon, and Ulli listened, smoking, saying nothing, so he kept talking.
She was on her sixth cigarette when he finished with the Uzbeks, and still she said nothing, so he told her about the bird bars and the back rooms and Howard, and how he didn’t know whether Howard really needed glasses or whether they were just part of his disguise, but Ulli was not interested in Howard. She wanted to know about the back rooms.
“Are you sure?” Leo asked, and Ulli said she was sure, so he told her, because now that he had started, there was no point in trying to protect her. Perhaps, he thought, if she could imagine the sex itself, she would understand that he could not change who he was no matter how m
uch he loved her, and he did love her. He kept telling her that, but she did not want to hear about love.
He described it all, hoping that when it came time to tell her about Oliver, the real reason he had to leave, he would not have to talk about Oliver in that way. He did not want to talk about what it felt like to be inside Oliver. He did not want her to think about how difficult it was after a long afternoon and evening in bed with Oliver for him to come home to Ulli and the girls. He did not tell Ulli about how, after they made love, Oliver played the clarinet, but he did tell Ulli that Oliver was a clarinetist.
“A sad instrument,” she said.
“A sad and beautiful instrument,” Leo said. But there was nothing sad about Oliver playing sad music on the clarinet.
Leo did not tell Ulli that he and Oliver walked in the park at dusk or that, even though Oliver was with the New York Philharmonic, he played those silly songs for Leo—“Yes! We Have No Bananas”—the songs they had sung in Berlin, drunk on vodka and the cold and being alive. That, he thought, would have been worse for her than imagining their lovemaking.
Switzerland
What Ulli thought about when she thought about Leo and Oliver was passion, the taut muscles, the sweat, the hardness of it all, and she could not help but think that all the time they had been together, Leo had been longing for her opposite. It made her sick because it negated her. Yet she could not stop herself from imagining them together. She clung to Leo, forced him to touch her, to be inside her. “Just one last time, so I can remember,” she said, and he obliged her again and again, the desperate act ending always in tears and regret. “When we were making love before, in Berlin, was it ever only us, was it ever just me?” she asked time and time again.
“Of course,” Leo said, which was not a lie, though they both knew that it was also not the truth.