Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  “Different how?” the girl wanted to know.

  For some reason, perhaps because he had been working on a crossword on the plane, he imagined a long string of letters, the alphabet stretched out like a track into the distance. He was strolling along it, stopping here and there, to celebrate at “b” for “birth,” to mourn at “d” for “death,” to heal at “h.” At fifty, there were actually more letters behind him than ahead of him. “m” … “n” … “o” The journey more than halfway done; he would soon glimpse on the horizon not so far ahead that final letter: “z.” For “Zero.” Nothing. Oblivion. “Seems kind of like a time for reflection,” he said to the girl.

  Yes, he was lonely. And wounded that Lily had once again forsaken him. The liquor was warm in his veins and now here was this lovely girl with warm lips beside him. Her hair, dryer now, sprung into a glorious tangle of brown curls. She picked up his left hand to examine the wedding ring.

  “I suppose your wife doesn’t understand you.”

  “Actually, she does,” William said. “I don’t understand her.”

  The girl held William’s hand to her heart. “You can do me a big favor,” she said.

  “What’s that?” William asked.

  “Hold me.”

  He took a shaky breath.

  “Nothing more. I just really would like if you could hold me.”

  With scotch-soaked logic, William thought about how Lily’s friend in the U.K. really needed her, and here was someone who needed him. If Lily could put someone else’s needs ahead of his, after all, why then shouldn’t he feel free to comfort a stranger who happened to be suffering? He held out his arms. She smelled like the rain.

  Afterwards, he saw that she didn’t want to leave, but William needed her to. He needed her to disappear without a trace. In his memory, she would be more phantom than reality, floating in a mist of single malt. He was glad he didn’t know her name. In fact, he rarely thought of her after that night, except now and then during an electrical storm, and of course when he got back home and her black lace panties fell out of his suitcase along with his laundry. The girl hadn’t seemed the type to walk around without panties. And how had he missed them when he swept up his dirty clothes from the floor the next morning?

  Lily had come to get him in the yard where he had been raking leaves. Her face gave nothing away. “Follow me,” was all she said.

  He had had the absurd notion that a family of mice might have taken up residence in her sweater drawer again. But then she pointed at the bed. She had arranged the panties neatly on the quilt. They looked alive, as if they might begin to crawl across the mattress like some gigantic malignant spider. He reached for her. “Lily …” he had said. “I can tell you ….” But what could he have possibly told her? She had interrupted him anyway.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

  “Can I just …?”

  She held her hands up in front of her face, fingers fanned, shielding herself from the sight of him. “No. Don’t say anything. Not ever, William. I mean it. Not ever.” She turned her back on him and walked out of the room.

  For weeks after that, she was quiet around him, around everyone, in fact. She was unfailingly considerate, but often enough he could see in her face that she had been crying. So could Stella, who asked William what was wrong with her mother. Time slipped by, and at last the day came when she at least smiled again, and some time after that, her laughter returned. He had been terrified to touch her, but in the spring she had come naked to their bed. He knew she wept afterwards, but they resumed their regular lovemaking.

  If anything, Lily grew more beautiful as she aged. He would look at the wrinkles in her face and feel privileged to be the resident witness of her evolution. And now she was gone. Oh, the sorrow of her absence. How futile to imagine that the drug dripping into his veins right now could relieve the terrible pain of losing her.

  And then, when he awoke, she was there. She sat beside his bed, her eyes fastened on him, as if she had been watching him exactly like that for days.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” he whispered.

  “I just got off my flight,” she said. “The first one home.”

  “But it’s been days, weeks ….”

  She smiled. “No. They brought you in just yesterday.”

  That seemed impossible. “Did they tell you what happened?”

  “You had a heart attack,” she said.

  He took that in. “Oh,” he said finally. “All right.”

  “All right?” she echoed.

  “My heart, Lily,” he said. “I must have worn it out, loving you.”

  Asunder

  Stella: 1984

  Stella had been in love with Simon her entire life. It felt even then, at fourteen, that the ingredients of him had always been in her head, just waiting to gel into flesh and blood. She remembered thinking when he finally showed up that summer day: oh, yes, there you are. What took you so long?

  She used to amuse herself sometimes by thinking about what single word applied to people she knew. Amy’s friend Wayne, for instance, was bugs. She felt confident that insects were the last things he thought about before falling asleep each night and the first things when he woke up in the morning. The word for her daughter, Amy, was just as easy: writing. Amy had a regular job now, in the foreign rights department of a publisher in the city, but that wasn’t who she was. Often during a conversation, her eyes looked vacant and you knew that she was listening to those other people she’d invented rather than to you. Stella’s own word was Simon. And Simon’s, of course, was Jeremy—presenting the tragic little love triangle that had simmered beneath them for years like some poisonous polluted river. Stella had always hoped that it would dry up over time. Instead, it had boiled up into a torrent that had finally swept Simon away from her four years ago. Stella had collapsed into a bereavement of singular torment, intensified by Simon’s proximity in the same town. She would make a trip to the post office, praying that she would not see him, but grieved all the same when there was not so much as a glimpse of him. Rarely, there was a sighting. It was always the same: Simon, wraithlike now, fled before the moment of collision. How she missed all the most specific and familiar aspects of him—how his big toes didn’t match, for instance, how the leftover English accent surfaced when he was tired, how he walked with such easy grace—these were the things that taunted her.

  She realized that he was suffering more than she could ever imagine. And yet, she resented the fact that the better part of her life, from adolescence on, had been spent in response to Simon. Why, after all, had she dedicated herself to working with desperate populations in faraway lands? Surely it was in large part an escape from the pain of her early conviction that Simon did not love her and never would. He was fond of her, certainly, and wrote her long chatty letters. A blue airmail missive would show up in her mailbox and she would think, maybe this time. She tried not to hope, knowing that it was fruitless, but she couldn’t help herself. She would save the letter, unopened, for hours before reading it, teasing herself, or perhaps putting off the inevitable pain. Either way, she would succumb in the end, taking care not to tear the fragile paper. A deep breath, and then she was with him as he unraveled the past few weeks of his life, often flippantly describing the details of a love affair gone wrong. She succeeded in forcing herself to wait at least a week to reply, but failed to throw his letters out. She had them still, in an old hat box of her mother’s that smelled faintly of lavender.

  Back in their youth, Stella and Simon had seldom gone more than a few months without seeing one another. Their mothers were friends and there were visits on both sides of the Atlantic. Stella lived for those times and yet they tortured her. She was confident that he did not lie awake thinking of her face, that saying her name did not feel like a prayer in his mouth, that the sound of her voice did not reverberate through his body like the vibrations of a guitar string. So she t
ook the veil, a secular nun, renounced romance and made herself useful.

  And then there was the Christmas miracle. It happened in her parents’ house upstate at Indian Wells one December when she and Simon were in their twenties. Simon had taken a job in New York as an interviewer at an employment agency. It was something to do until he figured out his future, but he enjoyed the work, each day a series of dramatized short stories, each client’s predicament more fascinating than the last. Stella was between projects, but with the Democrats in power in Washington, funding had loosened up. There was a grant pending on a women’s health center in the Ivory Coast that looked like it might come through.

  As usual, Simon had been included for the holidays. It was late on Christmas night and Stella’s parents had gone to bed early, overcome by the glut of too many gifts and too much good food. Simon and Stella sat side by side on the couch in the glow of the tree lights and the fire. Corny holiday music slid from the stereo as they traded narratives about their exciting new lives as participants in the real world. Bing Crosby began to sing, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …” Simon set his wine glass down, stood and offered his hand to her. “Come on, Stella, we’ve never danced together.”

  She could still remember the absurd acrobatics performed by her heart as she stood and moved into his arms. Aware that she was blushing, she hid her face against his shoulder. They were both tall, he over six feet and Stella only a few inches shorter. In all these years, there had only been quick friendly hugs between them, but now she became aware of how her body aligned with his—chest, abdomen, hips—how the arc of her shoulder nested into the hollow below his own.

  “… where the treetops glisten and children listen …” Their steps slowed until they were merely swaying in time to the music. Stella unconsciously held her breath. Surely he could feel her heartbeats pummeling him like little fists. Simon tightened his arms around her and it was as if all the hours and days and months they had shared over their lives were caught between them in their embrace. Then, as the song drew to a close— “And may all your Christmases be white …”—he held her away and looked into her face. Silently she wondered, would he tell her yet again how she was his best friend and that he could never manage without her? Because she could not bear that, she remembered thinking. She would not have seen him again afterwards. It was too hard.

  “I’m in love with you, Stella,” he said.

  Each word a thundering crash from the heavens. Stella staggered a little, closed her eyes and replayed them in her head. She had surely misheard him.

  “I have been for a while,” he said. “I just didn’t know it.”

  Tears collected on her lower lashes, trembled there, and spilled down her cheeks. Simon brushed them away with his thumbs and cupped her face.

  “Dance with me again,” she said.

  “I’ll be home for Christmas …” sang Bing.

  Simon smiled and gathered her back into his arms. “… you can count on me …”

  Throughout the ensuing years, until Simon finally slipped away from her, she would wake in the morning wherever she was and think of him, of how he loved her, and often of that very night when he had first told her. Those few seconds would remain in her memory as the birth of her complete self, of what she could only think of as her soul. Sometimes it astonished her, that the memory would be so fresh, as if it had occurred only days ago. She would have thought that it would fade and ultimately lose its impact, like a favorite song played over and over until its power to transport is utterly worn away. But no, she would think of him and feel herself levitate to hover halfway to the ceiling, buoyed by joy and gratitude. Often, Simon would put music on the stereo after dinner and dance with her, a ritual that amused Amy to no end. Stella would melt into his arms. “I’m drunk,” she would whisper. “I’m drunk with love.”

  That January after Simon’s avowal, they had driven through a snowstorm to Carnegie Hall to hear Vladimir Horowitz. Stella had been so captivated that she felt woozy and had to remind herself to breathe. After the many encores, Stella and Simon stood applauding in a kind of trance. When the stage was finally empty, Simon turned to her and said, “Let’s get married.”

  “Okay,” she said. “When?”

  “Next week,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said again.

  “Excellent.” He grinned at her.

  “I think you should probably kiss me,” Stella said.

  He obliged. It had to have been the longest kiss in human memory, Stella thought. By the time he finally released her, just about everyone had filed out of the hall.

  They walked out into a soft winter night. A light snow was falling, blurring the hard edges of the city and transforming it into a black-and-white photograph. Simon had hold of her around the waist. Stella plucked the arm of a young man hurrying past with a backpack. He turned.

  “We’re in love,” she said. “We’re getting married.”

  “Right on,” he said, and continued on his way.

  “Hey, let’s get some hot chocolate,” Stella said. “Over there.” Hip to hip, they crossed the street and slipped into the coffee shop on the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Sixth Avenue.

  “One coffee, one hot chocolate,” Simon said to the waitress.

  “We’re getting married next week,” Stella told her.

  “Nice,” the waitress said, clearly less than delighted with their order and the tip it suggested.

  “We’re very much in love,” Stella said.

  “One cheesecake and a rice pudding,” Simon added.

  Somewhat mollified, the waitress gave them a half smile and moved away. Stella got up immediately and squeezed herself onto Simon’s lap.

  “I love that I’ve known you since you were a kid with scabby knees,” Simon said.

  “And now I’m a grown-up with scabby knees,” Stella said.

  The snow had started to come down in earnest as they walked back to Stella’s apartment. A couple hurried toward them. They seemed engaged in an argument, but Stella, undaunted, stopped them anyway. “This man proposed to me tonight,” Stella told them. “I said yes.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” the woman said, and pulled the man away down the street.

  Stella stared after them and back at Simon. His eyes were watering from suppressed mirth.

  “Anyway,” Simon said after they had recovered. “You didn’t say ‘yes,’ you said ‘okay.’”

  And so it was that they embarked on a romance that lasted nearly two decades, until the grasp of that early tragedy reclaimed Simon. His withdrawal froze Stella out. When he entered the room, the temperature dropped. At the dinner table, he sat like an ice sculpture, silent and staring ahead. In bed, his forced “good night” was often the only sound she had heard from him all day. One night, she stared at his rigid shape beside her and thought, as she had countless times before: Talk to me about your brother. Give him to me, to us to share. But she knew from long experience what such a plea would elicit: not just silence, but such a naked expression of pain that she would have to avert her eyes at the sight of it.

  So instead she said, “Please, Simon. Can we at least talk to each other?”

  He lay still for a moment. “I hate that I’m doing this to you,” he said finally, then got up and went into the den. He slept on the couch thereafter.

  She couldn’t remember who had initiated the final split. It was something they both knew must happen. In no way did that conviction ease the agony of his departure, however, and there had been several times when Stella had weakened, usually with the excuse that reconciliation would be good for Amy. The last attempt had been a year ago. When he phoned her back, he sounded almost like himself. A flicker of hope lit up in her head, and she gripped the steering wheel tight as she drove to the diner, “their” diner, where they had spent countless hours talking, arguing, teasing. She had begun to go into labor at that place. They had joked that this was why Amy’s favorite foods c
ame straight off the menu.

  He was already there when she arrived, and stood to kiss her cheek. A bad sign, but she shoved her foreboding aside. After all, he had showed up.

  Their old waitress stopped by. “Good to see you,” she said, grinning at the sight of them together after so long. “Same old, same old?”

  “That’d be fine,” Simon said.

  There was no color in his voice. Fear began to creep into Stella like some sort of furtive, burrowing insect.

  “Amy over the flu?” Simon asked.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “I’ll call her,” he said in that dead voice.

  Amy was to some small extent an exception to Simon’s shutdown. For his daughter, at least, he made what must have been a supreme effort to communicate, however minimally. Stella was grateful for it, but nonetheless could not help resenting that what he could do for Amy he somehow could not do for her.

  “You phoned me,” Simon said.

  “Yes. I guess I was wondering if maybe …” she stammered, “… if maybe we could give it another try. For Amy’s sake.”

  “Amy’s sake,” he echoed, staring at her blankly.

  What had this soulless man done with her husband?

  “Why did you answer my call?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply. The waitress set down two corn muffins, with raspberry jam for Simon and honey for her. No longer looking so cheerful now, she slunk away without a word.

  “I’m sorry, Stella,” he said finally.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Stella whispered.