You Are My Heart and Other Stories

by Jay Neugeboren

  In the letter’s final version, he had edited out an appeal to self-interest: the deadly truth, given that viruses were now frequent flyers—passengers moving around the globe with astonishing speed—that what happened in South Africa, South America, South East Asia, or the South Pacific affected us. We were, none of us, islands entire unto ourselves, and we were none of us safe. Whatever spread across poor nations would eventually spread across wealthy nations. It behooved us then, for our own well-being, to think of others, to think long-term, and to be generous. It was better, that is, and in the most literal way, to give than to receive.

  So that what Saul hoped to do during his mini-sabbatical of four months was to explore and write about why it was we seemed destined never, as a species, to think in our own long-term interests. Was there some underlying biological reason for this inability to respond to conditions that had the potential to destroy us? Did we possess some kind of innate biological death-wish that would lead, inevitably, to our destruction?

  The questions, he believed, if obvious, were the ones to ask. How and where he would find anything resembling answers, though, was beyond him. We did not respond to the familiar because it was familiar—because it was regular, predictable, and did not appear dangerous. That much he had figured out. Also: that people became excited about crises—an anthrax scare, a tsunami, SARS—acute incidents in which somebody was done in by a can of contaminated food or a bottle of adulterated pills. As for insurance companies, why should they think long-term when the clients they were serving now would probably not be the clients they would be serving a year or two from now?

  But AIDS—medically, epidemiologically, politically—was hardly predictable or ordinary. There must, therefore, he believed, be some biological reason for our inability to respond to it in a sane, sensible, and self-interested way. He was not, however, a biologist, an animal behaviorist, an epidemiologist, or an anthropologist. Nor did he know much about what would, in this instance, probably be the most useful disciplines: sociobiology and evolutionary medicine.

  What he did know was AIDS. He knew, clinically and from the literature, its toll—past, present, and future. Still, if he found answers—if he could write a book that would be the equivalent for the twenty-first century of what Camus’s book had been for the second half of the twentieth, what then? Had The Plague changed anything?

  Janice, a clinical psychologist who worked as a consultant to school districts while maintaining a small private practice, had thought the letter foolish—a transparently childish attempt to get himself punished, and further proof that he was losing it: that he was overworked and depressed, and that his years of caring for AIDS patients had finally done him in. He couldn’t disagree, for until the last few years, when a new generation of antiretrovirals had, blessedly, proven effective, every last one of the thousands of AIDS patients he had tended to during the previous two decades had died.

  But even before the AIDS pandemic had exacerbated what Janice saw as Saul’s considerable capacity for survivor guilt, she had frequently remarked on the obvious: his tendency to dwell not on those patients whose sufferings he had ameliorated, or whose lives he had saved, but—always, always—on those he had lost.

  What he also hoped to do during his leave—thus his acquiescing to Janice’s insistence that he take the mini-sabbatical the medical school had offered—was to try to repair their marriage, though given how far each of them had strayed in recent years, he doubted this was possible. Still, returning to a place where they had been happy once upon a time, might, they both agreed, help, for it did remain true—a tangible basis for hope?—that they had stayed together for more than forty years in a time when most people they knew—friends, relatives, colleagues—had long ago divorced and moved on to new couplings, new marriages.

  Saul watched the turtles slide from the rock and disappear into the river, one following the other, and only when the third one was gone did he become aware that Janice had, and for some time, been leaning against him, her hand on his shoulder.

  Walking back through town, they stopped in front of a larger building—Hotel du Midi—not the hotel they had once stayed in, but another—to read signs taped to the hotel’s door: a handwritten note from the propriétaires, Monsieur and Madame Bruno (the hotel and restaurant would be open again from May 15 to September 15); from the village’s church (times for Sunday Mass and weekday services); from the mayor’s office (times that water would be turned off; rules concerning sheep, goats, pigeons, and dogs); and—what had caught Saul’s eye—a poster announcing a concert by The Turetzky Duo, to be held in Grasse at the Maison de Jeunesse et de Culture.

  “Didn’t we hear them in Boston a few years back?” Janice asked.

  “Yes. But they were a trio then. The Turetzky Trio. The violinist and the cellist were brothers. The pianist was the cellist’s wife.”

  “She wore a full-length, low-cut gown—burgundy, I recall, with black lace trim,” Janice said. “And they performed my favorite—the Schubert ‘B flat Trio.’ She was an exceptionally beautiful woman.”

  “Was she?”

  “As if you wouldn’t notice,” Janice said. “Tell me, Saul—we’re alone, nobody else will hear—but have you ever met a beautiful woman you didn’t remember?”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  Entrevaux had only three passageways that could legitimately be called streets, only one of which was wide enough to allow for automobiles, so that when they had circled back to their car a third time without having encountered anyone from the village, or found the hotel, Janice suggested they move on.

  “Does anyone live here anymore?” she asked.

  “I heard a dog bark,” Saul said.

  “Do you remember, when we first read through the Plus Beaux Villages book, how I noticed that there were rarely people in the photos?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I remember you noticed that. You said that the villages seemed very beautiful, and very dead.”

  “I’d forgotten, too, once you’re inside these villages, how little light gets through,” Janice said. “All the alleyways and narrow streets, the thick walls without windows—”

  “To keep out cold and wind in winter,” Saul said, “and to keep out sun and heat in summer. Also to protect against invasions. In villages like this—villages perchés—most of the windows to the outside were added in the years after the villages had lost their military role.”

  “My scholar,” Janice said.

  “Don’t mock, please.”

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  She pressed herself against him, lightly, and nibbled at his ear. He did not push her away.

  “Can we go, please?” he asked.

  He opened the car door, but before getting in he stepped behind Janice and nuzzled her, his mouth on the nape of her neck. Her skin was warm and salty, and he considered lifting her skirt and doing her from behind—he was confident they could, close to the car, bring this off while seeming to be embracing—but as he bit at her neck, he found himself troubled momentarily by his anger. Was his sudden desire to hurt her, he wondered, greater than his desire for her? But, as often happened, he found, too, that he was soon comforted—his ardor and rage compromised—by what had become a heartening, familiar thought: that though H.I.V. and AIDS would be with us for the rest of human history, he would not.

  The Debt

  You will doubtless be surprised to hear from me after so many years, she had written. She wished she had been able to send the check long before this, she explained, not so that their accounts could be settled—that was hardly her intent—but so that she might, for her part—she wouldn’t presume to speak for him—feel, at last, that what they had decided, and done, once upon a time, had been truly and equally shared. What she continued to long for in this life—was it the same for him?—was mutuality: an easy, ongoing mutuality.

  She had apologized for the awkwardness of her phra
sings—yes, despite her seeming (and practiced!) air of self-confidence, she found herself, still, feeling helplessly self-conscious the instant she put words on paper that he would see—after which she filled him in on the basics of her life since they had last seen each other: her three children were grown and married; she had five grandchildren; she had been a widow for more than seven years; she was working part-time—estate planning—for a small Wall Street law firm. She hoped that life had been kind to him, and that perhaps—he should feel no obligation—they might meet for dinner or a drink now that she was once again living in New York City.

  And now that I’m a widower? he heard himself ask. But how would she have known, he wondered. And: was he flattering himself to imagine that this was her reason for writing. He had written back, and—out of curiosity? guilt? kindness?—suggested they meet for lunch.

  He had considered The West End Bar, or the V & T Pizzeria—places near Columbia University where they had hung out together when they were students, she in the law school, he in the graduate department of English and Comparative Literature—but had decided instead on a restaurant that had not been there when they were living together: Henry’s, which was at the corner of Broadway and West 105th Street.

  When he saw her enter the restaurant, and when she made her way to his table, where she kissed him lightly—her cheek was warm—and when she stepped back and told him how wonderful it was to see him again, how wonderfully fit he looked—he found, to his surprise, that tears were welling in his eyes, and that he was doing what he had been warning himself not to do: remembering the first time he had ever seen her.

  It had been Veterans Day, 1967. The air was crisp, the sky blue and cloudless, the crowd of anti-war protestors among whom he stood, animated and happy. Across the street, the people who lined the sidewalk behind police barricades with their banners, posters, and flags—in support of the war in Vietnam—seemed equally happy, the chants each side launched into the air little more than friendly cheers for rival football teams.

  Margaret was wearing a pale V-neck lavender sweater, a purple paisely scarf knotted loosely around her neck. Her wheatcolored hair, shoulder-length, was, in the autumn sunlight, laced with threads of gold, and she appeared to him to have stepped straight out of a Saks Fifth Avenue advertisement so as to take her place—out of place—among those whose fashions seemed, for the most part, to have been purchased from clothing racks in Salvation Army thrift stores.

  She seemed the kind of woman—beautiful, cool, poised—who had always had the power to intimidate him: a woman who, he assumed, went to debutante balls with self-assured men who were destined to run Fortune 500 companies, to own yachts, and—always, always—to sweat less than he did. What, he wondered at the time, was a woman like this doing in the front line of anti-war protestors? And what could she ever want with an intense, curly-headed Jewish boy from Brooklyn?

  Still, when she turned and looked his way, and when she smiled—a quizzical smile, as in: We’ve met before, yes?— he gained the courage he usually lacked, pushed through the crowd, and made his way to her side. He began talking at once—about the rally, about the weather, about the war, about whatever came to mind—and she responded easily. Her hazel-green eyes, above ruddy high-colored cheeks, had seemed almost translucent, and—what he had not expected—warm and inviting.

  When she asked his name, then pointed uptown, he saw that a military band was approaching, and that behind the band a phalanx of soldiers in camouflage khakis, rifles to their shoulders, were marching in lock step, motorcycles cruising slowly at their sides. “I’m glad to meet you, Paul,” she said, shaking his hand, “but would you excuse me, please?” Then she had turned away, slipped under a wooden baricade, walked out onto Fifth Avenue, and, along with about two dozen others, sat down in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the oncoming parade.

  Within a minute, police were there, confiscating the banner she and the others had unfurled—END THE WAR NOW! BRING OUR BOYS HOME!—and dragging them away. It was only when he saw her being led to a police van—she did not, like most of the protestors, trained, he assumed, in passive resistance, go limp, but instead, her hand in the hand of a tall, young policeman, walked up three steps and into the van as if she were being helped into a hansom cab—that it occurred to him that he had not asked her name.

  So he found out which station house the protestors were being taken to, and after that, which court house for arraignment, and at seven-thirty that night, when she was released on her own recognizance pending a hearing, he was waiting for her.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” she said. She took the single yellow rose he held out to her, inhaled its fragrance, kissed him on the cheek. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’m positively ravenous!”

  She took his hand in hers, and while she told him about what had happened in the half-dozen hours since her arrest—the judge, she suspected, from his manner, was as opposed to the war as they were; the policeman who put her in the van had asked for her phone number—they made their way to Chinatown, where they ate and talked, and then talked more, on and on and on. He had walked her home—she lived in Greenwich Village, in a one-bedroom apartment above an Italian restaurant, a few doors down from the Waverly Theater—where she invited him in, and where they made love until dawn. Two weeks later, he moved out of his one-room Upper West Side fifth floor walk-up and into her apartment. They had stayed together for the next three and a half years.

  “I trust my letter, coming out of the blue—and with the check—” she began.

  “And with the check,” he repeated.

  “You noticed.” She reached across the table, took one of his hands in both of hers. “I trust it didn’t shock you, Paul, but I’d been thinking of doing this for so many years that it seemed as if—”

  She stopped.

  “—as if it would allow you to put the experience to rest?”

  “No,” she said. “I’d been thinking of sending it for so many years that it seemed as if I’d already sent it.”

  “ ‘ Closure,’ ” he said, “ ‘ Closure’ is the operative word these days, to judge from conversations with my students. They’re forever wanting closure on their relationships.”

  “Closure?” She cocked her head to the side. “Possibly. But as soon as I mailed the letter, I realized the obvious—that what I wanted resembled overture much more than closure.”

  “Well, here we are,” he said. “So that some wishes, it seems—even when unacknowledged—do come true.”

  “The unconscious never sleeps,” she said.

  “A good, if sometimes troubling fact,” he said. “But I can’t accept the check,” he added quickly. “In fact, I’ve already torn it up.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “For starters, I remember giving you three hundred fifty dollars in small bills to give to the doctor. The check you wrote was for more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “For starters—” she glanced at a waiter who was standing beside their table “—for starters, I’ll have a dry Martini, two olives, no twist.”

  “The same,” Paul said.

  She smiled easily, leaned toward him. “I remember the first time I ordered a dry Martini, and you told me that E. B. White claimed it was the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”

  “That was H. L. Mencken,” Paul said. “White called it ‘the elixir of quietude.’ ”

  She sat up straight. “The amount,” she stated, “represented interest on three hundred and fifty dollars compounded quarterly at five percent for forty-one years.”

  “That’s ridiculous, and you know it,” he said.

  “But it served to compound your guilt enough for you to agree to meet with me.”

  “It wasn’t the check that brought me here,” he said. “As far as I can tell, I feel no guilt now, and never did.”

  “None? ”

  “I’ve always thought that what we did—what you went through—
set us both free,” he said, and, having anticipated her reaction to his having torn up the check, he continued to speak words he had prepared in advance: “I felt for your pain, of course, if that’s the right word—for the ordeal you endured, which was surely unpleasant, and, as I recall, made you feel dirty and ashamed—”

  “ ‘ Sinful’ would be the apt word,” she interjected, “given that until the age of eighteen, I was taught by nuns.”

  “Sinful then,” Paul said. “And there were all the lies and secrecy, the man asking for a kiss when it was over…”

  “Well, some things are better now than they were then. Young people have more options these days, wouldn’t you say? They don’t have to sneak around the way we did.”

  “Still bitter, aren’t you? I never insisted, you know. I—”

  “Bitter? Not at all,” she said. “Actually, it pleases me that you remember details—the amount, the doctor’s gentle perversity—you reacted with such cold logic at the time—such rationality—that—”

  “Opinions to the contrary notwithstanding, I was not unfeeling, then or now. What was our alternative? To bring an unwanted child into the world who would have been resented, and who—”

  Confused momentarily to hear himself rehearsing old arguments, he stopped.

  “We don’t know that,” she said. “When it comes to such matters, we have no double-blind study. As you were fond of saying, we’re not living in a first draft. This—our lives now—is it, yes?”