You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  Karen’s grandmother came out on the porch then, along with two of Karen’s little brothers, Edgar and Joel, and started yelling at me to leave her granddaughter alone or she’d call the police, and I told her to go ahead and call the police, and then for some reason I started in singing as loud as I could the first song that came into my head—“Oh Happy Day”—and asking her and Karen to join in with me, and when her grandmother went back inside and I kept singing, Karen told me I was truly nuts and that her grandmother meant what she said and that I’d better get out of there.

  I thanked Karen for being concerned for my safety, and walked down the street—the Tompkins twins came out onto their porch and made circles at the sides of their heads with their index fingers, which they then pointed at me to show that they agreed with Karen about me being nuts—and I just waved to them and kept singing at the top of my lungs—“Oh happy day… Oh happy day…”—but with, I hoped Karen would notice, the best voice control I’d ever had.

  By the time I got home I was feeling pretty low, and I telephoned Karen at least a half-dozen times before supper, but each time when I said “Is Karen there?” the person on the other end hung up on me. I walked from room to room of my apartment, then picked up the model of the house we’d been working on and in a sudden fit of frustration almost threw it against the wall, but instead I set it down gently on my desk and caressed it as if it were a puppy, and spoke to it, telling it that everything was going to be all right. All I really wanted was to erase everything that had been happening, and for things to be okay between me and Karen the way they’d been before I’d shot my mouth off at Mr. Ordover. All I really wanted, I knew, was for somebody to tell me everything would be all right—to talk to me with some tenderness.

  I lay down on my bed then and, imagining Karen was there with me, I closed my eyes and unzipped my fly. The next thing I knew, the phone rang but I was in such a deep sleep that at first I didn’t know where I was or what time it was. I stumbled into the foyer, where our telephone was.

  “Hi. This is Marcia, from Belle Harbor,” the voice said. “Your old flame.”

  I said something back about being glad to hear from her, and she said she was only calling because she wanted me to know that she hadn’t put her mother up to calling my mother. In fact, she had no idea how her mother even got my phone number.

  “And I’m not calling to get you to go to the prom with me,” she added. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t put my mother up to calling. God! ”

  “I figured,” I said. “I mean, I figured you had nothing to do with it.”

  “And also, as long as we’re talking, that I followed your team this year. I saw a lot of your box scores.”

  “You did?!”

  “Sure. Some girls like saxophone players, but—shh: don’t tell anybody—I’ve always had a thing for basketball players.”

  “Well, we lost the big one—”

  “Lose the game, win the girl—” she said quickly.

  “Which one?”

  “The girl of your dreams.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Only listen,” she said. “I’m probably embarassing you—which is definitely my intention—but I really did want you to know what happened, and also that if you invite me to the prom, I’ll go with you.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” I said back, and when I did she laughed.

  “Really, though,” she said. “I was just pulling your chain. You don’t have to go with me. I mean, it’s no big deal. Only—”

  “Only what—?”

  “I heard you were seeing somebody—keeping company, as my mother likes to put it.”

  “We broke up,” I said. “I mean, we just broke up—”

  “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Sorry and double-sorry.”

  Then, after she apologized some more for giving me such a hard time, she told me the story of what happened when she’d broken up with her boyfriend at the end of the summer—he wasn’t black, but he wasn’t Jewish either—and about how her parents had been on her case and how devastated she’d been, and I said I didn’t think that part of it—being devastated—had hit me yet. When I told her that my best guy-friend wasn’t talking to me either—I didn’t tell her he was Karen’s brother—and that it felt good to talk to someone—her voice got softer and she said I could call her anytime I wanted to talk. She knew what I was going through, she said, and she knew it helped to talk with somebody who’d been there too.

  We stayed on the phone for a long time, talking a lot about how our parents had bugged us, and we wound up deciding that the two of us could probably become Platonic friends—maybe even introduce each other to guys and girls we knew and double date some day, but that until then, where would the harm be if we called each other sometimes just to talk, or if I came out on Saturday night and we went to the prom together? If nothing else, it would make things easier for us at home with our parents so that we’d be freer to do what we wanted to do outside our homes. I asked about arrangements, and she said not to worry about a tux—it wasn’t formal—and that she’d call me back later in the evening with details.

  Instead of Marcia calling back, though, her mother called my mother to say that given the bus ride out to Belle Harbor, and given the fact that the dance might end late, I was welcome to stay over on Saturday night in their guest room.

  So I went to the prom, and Marcia and I danced close all night, with her blowing in my ear sometimes and telling me she remembered what a great dancer I was and that if she remembered correctly, I was a pretty good kisser too. Mostly, though, she seemed happy just to be there, and to show me off to her friends—some of whom had seen me play in Madison Square Garden, and remembered when I’d come out to Belle Harbor before.

  After the dance, we went to one of her friends’ houses—all the kids from her crowd lived in private homes with garages, yards, and finished basements—and some of her friends passed around flasks of whiskey. There was a lot of necking and slow dancing, with the lights out except for a few candles, and some of the couples disappeared into other rooms. Marcia could tell I wasn’t in the mood for much, and when she asked if I was mooning over my girlfriend, I admitted that I was, so after a while, and without making out, she suggested we go back to her house.

  Her parents were still up when we got there, and we talked with them about the prom, and about which of Marcia’s friends had been there with which guys, and then Marcia said that we were both pretty tired, and her parents said how nice it was to see me again and told me they would see me at breakfast. Marcia showed me to the guest room in the basement, took some stuffed animals and extra pillows off the bed, told me she’d had a lovely time, thanked me for coming, especially given what I’d been going through, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and left.

  In the middle of the night, though—the clock-radio on the night table said it was 3:22—she woke me, lifted the covers, and got into the bed next to me.

  “The bad news is that I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “But that’s the good news too, along with the fact that my parents are fast asleep. I hope you don’t mind.”

  All she was wearing was a thin nightgown, and she started caressing me, then giving me these little bites up and down my body that drove me crazy, all the while asking, “Do you like that…? Do you like that…? Do you like that…?” and telling me that anytime I wanted her to stop all I had to do was say so.

  On Tuesday of the next week, Karen waited for me after school and asked me to go for a walk with her. We stayed silent all along Flatbush Avenue until we got to the park, and then she told me she’d heard that I’d gone to a dance in Belle Harbor and asked if I wanted to tell her about it.

  I shrugged, and asked what was there to tell, given that she had said we were finished with each other.

  “So that means I made you go to the dance with another girl, right?”

  “No,” I said. “But it—the dance—didn’t mean anything. I mean, my mother was after me—the gi
rl’s mother called my mother and—”

  “So you were forced to go by events beyond your control, is that it?”

  I told her that I went to the dance because I wanted to—that she and I were both free to do what we wanted, weren’t we? Were we engaged? Were we even going steady anymore?

  “I trusted you,” she said. “I loved you and I trusted you and in one week, you just…”

  She stopped talking, and I could see she was working hard to keep from crying.

  “You really stink, do you know that?” she said then. “But do you know the worst part? The worst part is that I still care for you more than is good for me, and I probably always will, so this is what I want to say: If you’re willing to try again—no matter our parents, or Olen, or our skin, or whatever—I’m willing.”

  “So?” I asked.

  “So?” she exclaimed. “So?! So are you? Do you want to try again?”

  “Look,” I began. “I really do care for you, only—”

  “Only you just answered my question,” she said. “Lord help you. You’re breaking my heart, but do you know what? At least I’ve got a heart to break.”

  And that was the last time we ever spoke.

  Olen didn’t go to college the following fall, and as far as I know he never went. But Karen did. In September, 1955, when I went off to college—Hamilton College, in upstate New York, where, even though I stuck to my word and didn’t play for Mr. Ordover during my senior year at Erasmus, I was able to make the Hamilton team and became its starting point guard my junior year—Karen took a job as a secretary for a toy manufacturer in downtown Brooklyn.

  Whenever I came home on school vacations, and after college too, I’d ask around about her, and what I learned was that after a year or two as a secretary, she’d started going to Brooklyn College at night and during the summers, after which she did the same thing at Brooklyn Law School.

  Sometime in the early sixties, I was told, her family moved out of Brooklyn, but nobody could tell me exactly where they’d gone, and none of the guys knew what happened to Olen either. The year after he graduated, he’d worked for a while in the stock room at the new Macy’s department store on Flatbush Avenue, and after that there were rumors about him getting a tryout with the Harlem Globetrotters, or with the team of mostly white guys the Globetrotters toured with, but nobody knew for sure.

  When, in the summer of 1964, I took time out of school—I was in my last year at the Yale School of Architecture—to work down South helping to register voters, I found myself imagining—hoping—that Karen would be assigned to the same team I was on, that we’d meet and realize we still loved each other and that there was no force on earth strong enough to keep us from being together.

  But we didn’t meet down there, and the following summer—in June, 1965—I married Allison Plaut, a Jewish girl from Cleveland I fell in love with when she was a Yale junior and I was working as an apprentice architect for a company in the New Haven shipyards. After living in the New Haven area for eight years, I accepted a position in the design department of an international ship-building company near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Allison and I moved down there, where we raised our family—a girl and two boys—and where Allison worked first as an elementary school teacher, and later on as a professor in the School of Education at L.S.U., and where, once a year, with our children, and then by ourselves after our children went off to college, we’d drive down to New Orleans for Jazz Fest, where, no matter what other musicians were performing, I’d wind up spending all my time in the gospel tent, sometimes singing along to songs I remembered.

  Here or There

  When Peter Simmons had visited South Africa the previous summer, he had become concerned about several HIV-infected patients in Tugela Ferry who had died from a strain of tuberculosis that had proven resistant to all known drugs. Upon his return to the States, Peter, who was Professor of Medicine and Director of AIDS Programs at Johns Hopkins Medical School, had alerted the CDC to his discovery, and it turned out that the strain of tuberculosis, its identity obtained through molecular fingerprinting, had been known to the CDC since 1995. What they needed now, they told Peter, was a live culture of the bacteria in order to determine if other strains like it existed.

  Their attempts to acquire samples of the organism itself, however, had been thwarted by the South African government, which would not allow representatives of the CDC to enter the country. Perhaps, they suggested, when Peter was next in Tugela Ferry, he could obtain a culture and bring it back with him. And perhaps, Peter thought, he could persuade his daughter, Jennifer, who would arouse considerably less suspicion than he would, to accompany him to South Africa and to transport the sample. Perhaps, too, the assignment—its adventure—would distract her from her situation.

  The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now. The African proverb had been with Peter intermittently thoughout the day, the words softly and insistently repeating themselves, and they were with him again now while he sat at a café with Jennifer, an electric brazier beside their table giving off enough heat on this early December day to enable them to sit outside.

  Jennifer pointed to the large parking lot that took up most of the center of Saint Rémy—she had been staying in the town, on leave from her job, for more than two weeks now—and said that several mornings a week, the parking lot, along with many of the side streets that radiated from it, was transformed into a market.

  “I could be happy living here,” she said.

  “Who wouldn’t?” Peter said.

  “It’s a real village—a place where you can shop every day for the things you need for that day, and where you know the shopkeepers, where their children are friends with your children—”

  “You don’t have any children.”

  “It has all the perks of a larger city too,” Jennifer continued. “Museums, music festivals, art galleries. Lots of writers and artists live here—it’s not far from major cities, and from the sea—even from the Alps, if you travel inland a bit—”

  “You’re in a good mood, aren’t you?”

  “What could be bad?” Jennifer said. “I’m far from my phone, my computer, and my law office. I’m in a beautiful village in the south of France where—lucky me—I’m having a fashionable late-afternoon drink with my father.”

  “And you’re pregnant.”

  “Oh that!” Jennifer said, and waved the subject away.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You didn’t ask a question.”

  Peter leaned across the table. “Jennifer,” he said.

  “Dad,” she said, leaning toward him in the way he was leaning toward her.

  “Look. We’ve got to talk about what you’re going to do. I have no intention of telling you what to do, of course, but—”

  “But nothing, okay?” Jennifer said. “So how about, instead of you telling me the-choices-are-mine-but-you-just-want-tomake-sure-I-understand-the-consequences—you tell me what you think. How about—even better—you tell me what to do! It would be a relief, believe me, to have somebody just take over.”

  “I need more data,” Peter said. “What week are you in? Have you had an ultrasound yet? Do you love the guy? Does he know?”

  “Last question first. He doesn’t know and I don’t love him. I surely had the hots for him, but I’ve concluded that if I never saw him again, it wouldn’t be too soon. I don’t miss him. Plus, he’d make a lousy father—the kind of guy who’d say, ‘You deserve to have your career, dear, so I’ll play Mister Mom for our kids’—and then I’d arrive home to find him zoned out in front of the TV—yes, he’s a pot-head too—the house a wreck, the baby ass deep in poop and puke, and—”

  “Do you want the child?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not good enough,” Peter said.

  Jennifer looked away. She lifted her glass of wine, then set it back on the table. “I probably shouldn’t be having any alcohol,” she said. “W
hy didn’t you stop me?”

  “You’re a big girl,” Peter said. “And one drink won’t cause birth defects. All things in moderation.”

  “Including moderation, right?” Jennifer sighed. “But look—I know you think it would be good for me to go with you to South Africa instead of staying here and worrying my decision to death, not to mention causing my loving parents unnecessary anguish, but—” She stopped, waved her hand in front of his eyes. “Dad? Dad?! Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course. You think I think it would be good for you to come with me to South Africa and that—”

  “No! ” Jennifer slammed the table with the flat of her hand. “No. You can parrot my words back well enough, but you’re staring at that woman over there. It’s rude.”

  Peter had noticed a woman sitting a few tables away: an attractive, dark-haired woman, her shoulder-length hair parted to one side—in her mid-forties, he guessed—who was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

  “I thought she might be someone I knew,” Peter said. “She looked familiar.”

  “They all look familiar,” Jennifer said, and, nearly knocking over her glass of wine, leaned forward and slammed her hand on the table again. “I hate it when men do that—I absolutely hate it when they pretend to be listening while ogling another woman, and when a guy does it to me what I want to do is to pull an ice pick out of my handbag and jab it in one of his eyes. If we could do that to every man who thinks he has the right to stare at us that way, and if—”

  “Stop it. People are staring at you.”

  Jennifer sat back. “Okay,” she said. “I’m done for now. And yes, I did come here because of Van Gogh—because he spent the last year of his life here, before he killed himself—but rest assured I am not necessarily suicidal. I just like the peace and quiet—the beauty of the landscape that inspired him even while he was locked up and out of his mind—and I like being far from everything and everyone I know, and it was probably a mistake for you to visit me. Correct that. It was probably a mistake for me to say yes when you said you wanted to stop by on your way to do more of God’s work.”