You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  Jennifer forced a smile, then leaned back. “I’ll be fine in a few years,” she said.

  “I’m counting on it,” Peter said. Then: “Any morning sickness?”

  “No.”

  “Been to a doctor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What I think, then, is that you should have the child.”

  Jennifer grinned. “Thank God,” she said. “I was hoping you’d say that. So okay: here or there?”

  “There.”

  “Do I tell the father?”

  “Not necessarily. If he finds out, there could be legal complications. We need to know more first—to inform ourselves.”

  “What if I don’t do what you say—what if I don’t have the child?”

  “Then you don’t.”

  Jennifer cocked her head to the side. “You are a good man, you know,” she said. “Mom always said so, even when she was pissed at you. Maybe not the best dad in the world—you were away so damned much, and playing around, and—”

  “Now wait a minute—” Peter began.

  “Oh Dad, it doesn’t matter. I think it may have mattered to Mom in the beginning—she never said anything to me, but—” Jennifer stopped. “When I think about marriage—about finding a guy I’d want to have children with, and when I think about my age—past thirty—wow!—I mean, the idea of making love to one man and one man only for the next twenty or thirty years, it seems utterly ridiculous. I don’t get how people do it.”

  “Maybe they don’t.”

  “But then there’s all the secrecy and lying and sneaking around and hurt feelings. It all seems so stupid.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Living in France?”

  Peter laughed.

  “I’ve been angry with you—sure—but not for that,” Jennifer said. “I mean, you were working so damned hard all those years, going out to save lives every day, and when—”

  “Save lives? Not at all. Mostly they died. For every life I saved—prolonged, at best—at least a hundred died. Look. At last count in Tugela Ferry alone, fifty-two HIV-infected people have died from the strain of TB I was telling you about. And in just the short while we’ve been sitting here and talking, thousands of children have died of AIDS. More than eight thousand people a day are dying of AIDS—”

  “I don’t need to hear this now, okay?” Jennifer said, covering her ears with both hands. “You don’t get it, Dad. You just don’t get it, do you? You’re always so fucking righteous and correct. That’s the big problem. I mean, are you ever wrong? Have you ever done anything wrong?”

  “Evidently—to judge by your anger—I’ve done lots wrong.”

  Jennifer leaned back and smiled broadly. “But not lately,” she said. “So let’s have another drink, you and me.”

  Peter sat at the same table where he and Jennifer had had their drinks—to his invitation to have dinner together, she had pleaded fatigue—and he ordered supper: blanquette de veau, a salad, wine. The restaurant, about half full (the woman who had been sitting nearby was gone), was exceptionally quiet, and when he was done with his entrée, he ordered a favorite dessert—a tarte tatin, carmelized apple pie served upside down—and while he ate the pie and sipped coffee, he found himself remembering the first time he had flown into Durban, and of how, from the plane, the city’s harbor had reminded him of Miami Beach: golden beaches, sunbathers, surfers, fishing boats, cruise ships, modern hotels, skyscrapers…

  And thinking of Durban, he thought—how not?—of Khuthala, the health care worker who had been his companion during his visit to South Africa the previous summer. Was she still alive? Had she married again? Were her children well?

  Khuthala had two teenage daughters, but her husband, who had left four years earlier to work in the diamond mines in Kimberley, had not returned, and she did not expect that he would. Most South African women who were infected have had only one lover, she explained the first time she visited Peter in his apartment. The combination of migrant labor and an industrial society in which men worked where their labor was needed—for gold, sugar, diamonds—had proven to be the deadliest of marriages, for as men moved around the country and, periodically, returned home, they carried with them the infections they acquired, which infections they passed on to their wives, who passed them on to their children. Because of this, and to reassure him that she was one of the lucky ones and had not herself been HIV-infected, she had, on this first visit, brought her medical records with her.

  Peter had responded by telling her that it was a surprise to the people he had worked with in the States, especially during the years when the AIDS epidemic was exploding, to discover he was not gay. They called me ‘a righteous heterosexual’ back then, he said, and explained the phrase’s frame of reference: that those non-Jews who had helped save Jews during the Second World War were known as righteous gentiles.

  Well, Khuthala had replied, because you came here to work, I already knew you were righteous. And I have certainly been happy to learn that you are, in addition, heterosexual. More exactly, he recalled her saying—this toward morning of their first night together—what I’m feeling now is akin to what I suspect you were feeling when you looked at my medical records: reassured.

  That they had been able to give each other mutual reassurances had become the basis of a running joke. If only, they would suggest after making love, others could be reassured in the way they were, what a kinder, happier world it might be. And yet, how not at the same time be acutely aware that the act that gave them enormous pleasure, and comfort, was also the cause of great suffering and of death.

  Morning and evening—before and after work—Peter had loved walking through the markets with Khuthala, where the pungent fragrance of a multitude of curries filled the air, and where most vendors and shoppers were dressed in Indian garb—in wildly bright and swirling colors that made them look like enormous parakeets. And walking together to villages and encampments that neither cars nor motorbikes could reach—backpacks and bags of antiretroviral medications with them, and carrying umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun—he had been happy. He had felt something which, in another time and place he would have hesitated to state aloud for fear of being thought pompous, or overly sentimental: that he was once again, as he had been when the AIDS pandemic erupted two decades before, doing the work he believed he had been put on earth to do.

  When he let his mind drift back to his three visits to South Africa—a mere seven weeks, in all—and when he saw himself walking across a valley lush with tropical greenery, heading with Zhuthula and two other health care workers to a Zulu compound near the Tugela River—what he could not make sense of was how such a phenomenally beautiful landscape could be home to such a phenomenally deadly disease.

  He saw himself in a Zulu compound—one located in the Valley of a Thousand Hills—and he imagined that Jennifer was with him. He imagined that she was explaining how to take the antiretrovirals and how many to take each day and when to take them. He pictured the two of them leaving the hut and being shown, with pride, a stone-fenced cattle crawl in which there was one large cow and a scattering of chickens, and when he recalled the manner in which the people, some holding infants in their arms, had expressed gratitude to them—one hand holding onto the wrist of the hand that, palm upturned, was receiving medications from their hands—he imagined strands of hair falling from their skulls and drifting into the air, skin falling away from their bones in patches, teeth dropping from their mouths and landing one at a time, in soundless puffs of dust, on the dirt of the cattle crawl.

  A Missing Year: Letter To My Son

  “And so, if the world consisted only of me and you (a notion I was much inclined to have), then this purity of the world came to an end with you, and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me.”

  —Franz Kafka A Letter To His Father

  Dearest Charlie,

  If you are reading this, wherever you a
re, it will mean, of course, that I am no longer here (there?)—a shame, since when all is said and done, and here I paraphrase Orwell, I find that this world does suit me fairly well. And wherever I am, and unless we’ve both arrived simultaneously in some universe designed by Calvino or Borges, what I’m certain of is that there is no ‘I’ there. I never thought to persuade you of that—that when we’re gone, we’re gone and that’s all there is to it, so that the only immortality, as our people (mostly) believe (Jews, but not only Jews—cf. Shakespeare’s sonnets), lies in our children, in the memories others have of us, and in whatever work we may have left behind: literary stuff, of course, but anything made by one’s mind or hands that has tangible existence: music, furniture, boats, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, clothing, houses…

  Consciousness is fine—much studied and celebrated in recent times—but much overrated too, in my opinion, for even were it to survive in some way—were we, as in typical tales composed about such after-lives, to wake from death and find that, detached from any bodily being, mind and thought are, miraculously, still ongoing, I would doubtless spend whatever timeless time this ‘I’—this consciousness recognizably me and no one else—had been given, lamenting the loss of senses. Taste, touch, sight, sound, smell—smell above all!—how ever, ever, ever undervalue them?

  I.e., the grave’s a fine and private place, as Marvell famously wrote, but none, I think, do there embrace. Other articulations of this notion, along with its innumerable carpe diem corollaries about prefering the sybaritic, now accelerate within, creating a rather sweet traffic jam, yet I banish them at once, even as I ask forgiveness for my literary excesses, references, and airs, yes? These musings are—of course, of course—my somewhat arch way of avoiding telling you what I’ve decided to tell you about what I’ve always thought of as my ‘missing’ year—and also a reminder (to me) of how often in this life I’ve used words on paper to avoid other things. Through most of my life, that is, I’ve had the largely benign habit of passing whatever I experienced, in mind or flesh, through the filter (lens?) of what, other than you, my son, was the great love of my life: stories.

  I tested (tasted?) all I did—my writing, teaching, wives, romances, friendships, pleasures, losses, memories, feelings—all, all, all—through stories I’d read, and people, places, and events I’d come to know in them. More: I often gave myself up as fully as I was able to the imagination of others—let myself believe I was part of the mind—the sense-ibility—that had conjured up these worlds so that, I suppose—vain hope!—my own imagination, like theirs, might find objects and tales equal to my desire to find them.

  But to the missing year itself: My great fear, you see, was that I would kill you. I wanted to kill you. The idea of killing you thrilled and pleased in a time distinctly bereft of thrills or pleasure. For a year—fourteen months and three days, to be exact—I thought, every day, of killing you. The thought arrived, as you might guess, attached to my desire to do away with myself, and this desire arrived shortly before your mother left us both (nor, I note quickly, did I ever stoop to blackmailing her with the threat that I would kill the two of us if she did leave us). But the desire to kill the two of us came—this dark, unwelcome guest—and it stayed for more than a year, yet could occasionally, when most robust, bring with it (paradoxically?) an exhilarating feeling of liberation.

  The possibility of leaving this world, and taking you with me—of being in a place or non-place where consciousness was forever non-existent—this became balm to my pain, and the pain, let me tell you—and I hope you never know it in its dreadful particularity—was decidedly physical. During those fourteen months and three days I read a good deal about depression, which, I discovered, had a distinguished history, beginning at least 2500 years ago with Hippocrates, and though the reading taught me much about the melancholic disposition, and about suicidal desires and the pernicious ways they can take hold and take over, I found little about the sheer bodily pain that, as in my case, can accompany the affliction.

  Though I experienced most of what have become the standard symptoms that now make major depression certifiable and reimbursable (sleep disturbances, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of suicide), I experienced no weight loss, or loss of sexual desire, no headaches or flu-like symptoms, no sharp internal blade-like grindings. Instead, my lows were accompanied by constant nausea (even—especially!—during love-making), along with a vise-like pressure throughout my upper body, front and back, as if I’d been saturated with something heavier than blood—inhabited by a beast that was trying to suck and squeeze breath and life from me. When it came to rising from a bed or chair, the heaviness would at times paralyze me, as if the sheer weight of my body were the palpable equivalent of my spirits.

  Aware, however, that what I was experiencing might merely (merely?!) be advanced coronary artery disease, I did go to my physician, who forwarded me to a cardiologist, who—hope dashed again—found nothing wrong with my heart, or the arteries that fed it and were fed by it.

  Well, I told myself—much as the host of the annual sadomasochist convention is said to have announced—‘The good news this year is that we seem to have lots of bad news!’ For the cardiologist’s evaluation meant that what I was experiencing was, in fact, what I believed it to be: the great black bile itself—melancholic depression.

  So there we were, Charlie, abandoned by mother and wife, you having just passed your first birthday—the most beautiful, clever babe ever—and me relieving my newly acquired distress by imagining how sweet it would be to do away with you, and after you—my guilt now boundless!—with me (I spare you details of my how-to fantasies while assuring you that swiftness and lack of suffering for you were paramount in my considerations).

  Did I consider murdering your mother? Of course, though not for long, and not at all after I received a kind offer from a former student, a young man from an Italian family in Springfield, Massachusetts, who, learning of my situation, told me he could have a man-with-a-bent-nose (his phrase) take care of things. All I had to do was nod once and it would come to pass in a completely risk-free, cost-free manner.

  A mother abandoning a child, he said, was a mean-spirited and irresponsible act that went against both nature and biology, and it would be more than irresponsible—how I adored his repeated use of the word!—not to repair this flaw in the fabric of the world by cleansing it of its perpetrator.

  The offer was more than moderately attractive, for among the wealth of evils in human character, meanness-of-spirit and irresponsibility had always, as you know, ranked high in my private catalog. But no matter his assurances (or my desires), I declined the offer. What I feared, you see, was error. I was, that is, afraid of being caught, for being caught—whether for having committed the deed, or having assented to it—would have resulted in your being left to the care of others, and to coping not only with the sequelae of abandonment by a mother (a dead young mother, to boot), but with the burden of having been orphaned by a convicted murderer.

  There were comic possibilities here, for sure, though at the time so constant was the animal ache in mind and body that, as with cracked or broken ribs, the mere thought of laughter was enough to lay me out for hours (hmmm: did you know that—sweet memory—you and I shared afternoon nap-time back then, you in your crib, me on my office couch?). The only way I found to escape the constant pain—as undeserving, worthless, wretched, dull, hopeless, lazy, stupid, vain, and homely shlep of a man as I’d become—was by imagining the prospect of being somewhere else, and of having you there with me.

  Yet there was something else at work in the bowels of my gloom—a fear that arose from my hunger for vengeance: that should I fail to nail my courage to the sticking point in the act itself, she would come marching triumphantly back into your life, my deed confirmation of everything she wanted to believe and to have others believe. Plus, a dividend: she’d be the recipient of large quantities of cash, for she’d be seen as the long-suffering mother who’d fled an unh
ealthy situation—marriage to a dangerous, despicable, deranged man, the proof in the pudding of my murderous intent and botched self-annihilation.

  But consequences, Charlie—let us consider consequences. As I would often remind students: if they kept two principles in mind—that character was fate, and that there were no acts without consequences—they could begin to find their way into the workings (and delights) of all tales worthy of attention. When we were home alone, and I pictured our resident would-be Humbert Humbert (me!) mocked by her, I saw, too, the consequences of my inevitable bunglings. Insurance companies do not pay out for death-by-suicide, but her likely appeal—that I was not in my right mind when, at the eleventh hour, I changed beneficiaries (assigning all to charities)—would surely have carried the day. (Actually, I realize, despite a multitude of resolutions, I never did get around to changing anything in my will that year, which tells you something about melancholy, and how it can cause a lasting rupture between the desire to act and the ability to act.)

  Still, a question: Why did your mother leave us? You were probably hoping—how not?—that in this note you’d find answers, or at least the beginnings of answers. Why she left me—why any woman leaves a man—is rarely, on an overt level, mysterious. There are the usual suspects: She didn’t love me, she found me impossible, she wanted her freedom, she fell in love with somebody else, she experienced a sudden change-of-life, she was on alcohol and/or drugs, she found motherhood less than it was cracked up to be, she had a severe, debilitating postpartum chronic depression…

  But why she left you—ah, to that conundrum, I plead ignorance. While it’s true (and sad) that people hardly blink when men leave wives and children, I tend to agree with my Springfield student that when a mother does so, it would seem, in most instances, to go against nature and biology, and therefore, like a miracle—a miracle !—be beyond human understanding. For what defined God and God’s miracles in the Old Testament—from the great flood that covered the earth to the burning bush, from the ten plagues to the sun standing still in the heavens—were occurrences that, by definition, went against nature and the natural order, and could, thus, have been brought about only by a god who was transcendent and (also by definition) beyond our understanding.