Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  Her smile broadened. “Listen,” she said. “It doesn’t create any obligations on your part. The truth is, I’ve never had the courage to approach you at school. I must feel safe talking like this in a crowd. I don’t mean to be so clever or arch, but I am nervous—and when I saw the way you were glowering, I said to myself that it was time to act. It’s only that I thought you might kill somebody, from the way you looked.” She reached towards me, and when she touched me I didn’t draw back. “I thought you might break your hands.”

  I said nothing. I wondered if Tony would be coming soon, with Regina. I imagined the four of us walking along the boardwalk together, Gail and Tony making jokes to cheer me up, and I thought too of how good it would be simply to have somebody holding my hand, laughing with me, being affectionate. A train roared into the station. I didn’t pick up my bag. I didn’t look down at my hands. I didn’t want to recall the way I’d felt after the game. I saw some of the Jefferson players come through the turnstile now, holding their gym bags high. People cheered. I thought of Al Roth walking along Broadway under the arcades of movie theaters, hands in his pockets, walking and walking, all the way down to Union Square. I saw him going into a bar, sitting by himself, watching TV with a bunch of drunks. I saw him getting on the train late at night, when it was empty, and riding into Brooklyn, old newspapers under his shoes. The Jefferson players would change at 42nd Street for the New Lots Express, and I would change there for the Flatbush Express, but I didn’t want to ride with them for even one stop. And if they stayed on until Nevins or Franklin before they changed? If they noticed me and said things to me? If their girlfriends tried to flirt with me?

  Gail let out a long breath of air. “This is positively my last offer then. I’ll take you out for an ice cream soda, all right?”

  I saw the Jefferson players coming toward us. Light from the incoming train sprayed through Gail’s hair, making the dark curls seem suddenly silver. Gail smiled at me, but her smile broke slightly and I could see how scared she was that I might reject her.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Do you mean it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Oh Jesus.”

  We pushed our way toward the back of the platform. I kept my head twisted to the right, looking away from where the Jefferson players were. Someone set off a firecracker. Gail reached back and took my hand, pulled me along through the turnstile and then up the stairs and out into the street.

  “I think of your hands,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your face too, but it was your hands I noticed first. I think of them a lot. You won’t resent me later, will you? For pushing you so much? I’m really quite shy when you get to know me. The real me is shy and modest, is what I mean. I can be demure and domestic too, if I have to.” She shrugged, pulled her coat closer for warmth. “It’s just that I’ve taught myself to compensate for my natural shyness and insecurity by covering them up with this way I have of being terribly forward and direct. It alarms people sometimes. My mother disapproves. Are you alarmed, David? Do I alarm you?”

  “I’m just tired, I think.”

  We walked along Broadway, then turned up 48th Street, toward Seventh Avenue. It was raining again, a thin cool drizzle. I saw myself in a soft V-neck sweater, rust-colored, returning to Erasmus after I’d become a star for a college team. I was presenting Mr. Goldstein with an inscribed photo to put on his wall. I saw the faded brown pictures there, of men in old-fashioned uniforms, in business suits and Army uniforms and judges’ robes. Mr. Goldstein was shaking my hand and introducing me to a kid sitting in his office and telling the kid about the time I’d played my heart out after my father died, and for an instant I felt wonderful, imagining the look in that young boy’s eyes. Goldstein gazed at the photo and his smile vanished. He looked up, puzzled. I followed his eyes and saw that inside the black frame was a drawing, not a photo, and that it was not my own face staring up at me, but Abe’s.

  “Did you know that my father was blind in one eye?”

  “Yes. You mentioned it the day we came to your class, when my sister showed how splendid she is at reading Braille. It’s one reason I always thought I had a chance.”

  “A chance?”

  “With you.” She shivered. “Is my sister still blind. Sure. If she wasn’t blind, who would she be? I mean, she has a large investment in being a beautiful, altruistic blind woman. Everyone admires Ellen. Ellen Kogan, fair of mien, blessed of the Gods, eyeless in Gaza….”

  “You’re jealous of her.”

  “You’re perceptive.” She tugged at her beret, poked her hair under it. “Sure I’m jealous. But sometimes I’m not above using her affliction. As I did with you. If I didn’t have a beautiful blind sister, would you have remembered me?”

  “Once, when I was a kid, my father scratched his good eye and was blind for a few weeks and I….”

  “And you what? What were you going to say?”

  I shrugged. “And I was happy. That was what I was going to say. He was too, I think. He was very proud of how much he could do without his eyes.”

  “I am sorry about your father’s death, David, only I don’t know what to say, or if I should say anything at all. I used to see him on Flatbush Avenue sometimes, with his little briefcase and his hand over his good eye.” She stopped, pointed to a luncheonette. “Do you miss him yet? I’ve never lost anyone close to me that way. My four grandparents are still alive. My mother and father are here. My brother and sister are too much with us, late and soon.” I started to open the door, but she held back. “Only I don’t really put much stock in words. Can you believe me? If I could be sure you’d know what I was thinking and feeling, I’d….” She closed her eyes and came to me suddenly, placed her head lightly upon my chest. I didn’t move. I wanted to put my arms around her, but I was afraid to do anything more than let her head rest where it was. Her arms stayed at her sides, unmoving. “There,” she said, a few seconds later. “Wasn’t that better? What good are words for what we truly feel, after all? Can we ever know the difference—between a feeling and the name we give to a feeling?”

  We found a booth in the back and I helped her off with her coat, took off my jacket. She wore a gorgeous Scandinavian sweater, a pale peach-colored scarf at her throat. She took off her beret, leaned back, brushed her hair lightly from underneath. Her hair was dark and thick and the rain had made it frizz slightly. I thought of lamb’s wool, of the Persian lamb coat my grandfather had given my mother during the war, of the stories my mother told me about watching her father work on the coats when she was a girl. Gail said that during the game the students talked about my father’s death, about how brave I was to play. She said she didn’t agree with them, that she figured his death had made things easier for me. Was she right?

  In the bright steamy light of the luncheonette, I was surprised at the difference—at how, from a distance, her skin had seemed soft and smooth, but how, close up, you could see all the little scars and pock marks. I imagined her, at thirteen or fourteen, trying to scrub the acne away, trying to cover the pimples with makeup and Clearasil, healing the sores and scabs with creams and ointments.

  When the waitress came I ordered a hot chocolate and a grilled cheese sandwich. Gail asked if I minded her staring at me, and then, before I could react, she asked if I minded being teased. She said that I looked so sad sometimes, at school, that she had the feeling I spent my life believing people were about to make fun of me or accuse me of awful things. From the way I was smiling, though—my eyes first, crinkling at the corners—she figured that I didn’t mind being teased. The colors in her sweater were wonderfully soft and bright—greens, reds, ochres and browns in diamond-shaped designs that ran in a crescent across the top half. The background was beige, muted. I tried to imagine the colors on paper, in blacks and grays. Were I to draw her face, would I put in all the imperfections, all the tiny pitted marks that made her cheeks seem perforated? She lean
ed forward, elbows on the table, her face resting in her hands.

  “I like giving you a hard time,” she said. “And I do like looking at you. You have gorgeous eyes. They’re like your uncle’s eyes. But listen. Do you like my eyes? I think they’re my best feature. My mother claims they’re too large for my face and my father says we have to keep an eye on me—bulging eyes can be the early sign of some kind of hyperthyroid condition that troubled young ladies with antic dispositions can often have. Do you like them?”

  “They’re hazel.”

  “Well, that’s true.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassing you. Do you have enough money? I can pay for us if you want.” “It’s okay. I have enough.”

  “Tell me then—do you think you could learn to like a girl like me?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose—”

  “I suppose,” she said, and then she leaned back, crossed her arms against her chest and grinned. “What’s not to like, right?”

  “I guess.” I smiled. “My father used to use that expression.”

  She put her hands back on the table, and for a second I was afraid she was going to reach across and want to hold hands with me. She hadn’t said anything about what I’d said about my father, and yet I felt she had taken it in and wasn’t commenting because she knew that if she reacted too much she might scare me away.

  “Listen,” she offered. “Why don’t we just make believe we’re two high school students who happen to meet in the subway after a play-off game and decide to go and have something to eat together until the rush hour is over, all right? Just to keep one another company, since they recognize each other and go to the same school. Would that make you feel more comfortable about being with me?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. Her gaze was so intense—she seemed to care so much, to sense what I was feeling—that I looked away. “I mean, I’m feeling okay. It’s just that I never had anybody to talk to me the way you do. I’m distracted, is all. My head seems too full, with all that’s been happening. I’m sorry. I don’t mean not to pay attention to you.”

  “You’re the one who lost the game and the father and all I think about is whether or not I’m making a good impression on you. God! Would Ellen think of herself in a situation like this?”

  Gail looked down, tore at her napkin, rolled small bits of it into tiny pellets. The waitress brought our food. For a while we ate in silence. I thought of Tony and Regina, walking along the dark streets, Regina telling him that it was all right that we’d lost, that it wasn’t his fault. I thought of Abe, in his front office, getting a call from one of his men. Would he care if I lost? Would he be happier if I won? Gail sipped her hot chocolate quickly, bending down so that she wouldn’t have to pick up the cup. She licked marshmallow foam from her upper lip and asked me if I had a girlfriend. She said the girls at school couldn’t figure me out. Big athletic star. Strong, silent type. Handsome young man with brooding Semitic features. Some of them wondered if my uncle supplied me with women.

  “Being mysterious is the most attractive quality a person can have,” she said. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To know so much about a person, and still to want to know more—the way you feel at the end of a wonderful book. That’s the way I feel about you.”

  I thought of saying that she hadn’t read me yet, but I was afraid that if I did she might become self-conscious and stop talking to me the way she was—saying the things she’d waited so long to say—and so I said nothing.

  “Do you know what I wish sometimes, David? I wish I could learn to keep quiet so that other people would think I was more mysterious, that there were things about me that were unknown and unfathomable, strange and deep. Do you like poetry?”

  “Some.”

  She pressed her eyes closed and recited: “‘Below the surface-stream, shallow and light/Of what we say we feel—below the stream/As light, of what we think we feel—there flows/The noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,/The central stream of what we feel indeed.’” She opened her eyes. “Do you like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I knew how to be more patient. That’s my biggest problem. Gail Kogan, long on persistence, short on patience. What it is, is that I keep being afraid, when the situation is at hand, that if I remain quiet nobody will pay attention to me. My psychiatrist says that—”

  She clapped her hand over her mouth, coughed, gagged, raised her arms. I pushed her glass of water toward her. She gestured backwards. I stood, reached across, pounded her on the back. She coughed more, let her hands down.

  “You can sit now,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Thanks—”

  “Are you all right?”

  She grinned. “Were you worried?”

  “Yes.”

  She drank, took a long breath. “I see a psychiatrist two times a week. Do you mind? It won’t make you frightened of me?” She made a fist, looked straight at me, as if she were very angry, very determined. “Oh David, isn’t that the most scary thing of all—to be afraid that other people won’t like you, that you won’t be able to like them and trust them? Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

  She waited, but I didn’t say anything. “Do I make sense to you? Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “Did you write the poem?”

  “No. I like to memorize poetry, but I don’t like to write it. It seems too much trouble, in prospect, to school myself in all the meters and rhyme schemes and forms. It’s easier to memorize. Like studying for a test. I’m fine when somebody gives me a deadline, an exam, something specific to work toward, but if I have to do it on my own…it’s like wanting to get to the top of a staircase without going up the steps, to play the piano without practicing scales.”

  “Wouldn’t practicing scales be like studying?”

  “My mother says I’m two ends against the middle and that the middle is me. She’s very psychological. She’s taking courses at Teachers College now. She wants to be able to help other young girls like me, right? Yet when I do know what I want, I get so single-minded that it’s almost physically painful. I get so far ahead of myself, wanting the things I want, as I do now, with you, that…” She sat back, exhausted. “I should try to take things more slowly, shouldn’t I? Well. We’ve finished eating. You don’t have to sit next to me on the train going home. We could pretend we never met, that the past hour never occurred. There are lots of options. Louis Braille was only fifteen when he invented the Braille alphabet. What have we done that’s comparable? Whatever you want to do is okay with me, David Voloshin. You decide. I’m pooped. The effort has been tremendous, folks. Did she ever expect to get this far with the young man of her dreams? Could he tell how surprised she was when he agreed to depart from the subway station with her?”

  “Yes. He could.”

  She leaned toward me. “What were you thinking just then—when you said yes? Would you tell me?”

  “I was wondering if this is real. It all seems so crazy, as if I’m somewhere else dreaming that I’m here. I mean, with my father yesterday and then losing the game—”

  “I’m impatient because I’m afraid of being imperfect—that’s the way I’d put it, were you to ask. I was thinking that I was afraid you’d dislike me later on when you were alone, not for anything I’ve said or done, but for having let yourself share things with me. People are that way, I think. They become frightened of the people they’ve trusted. They feel tricked and betrayed. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I was being rhetorical. But listen: what I was thinking most was that it was your silence itself I’ve been after—what drew me to you—because whenever I see you or think of you I keep thinking that you’re silent and distant not because of what everybody thinks—your uncle and all—but because underneath you’re really like me. I keep thinking your silence and my brashness are there for the same reason: to cover up fears.” She breathed out. “Okay,” she said, and th
en—I had to blink, the shift in her manner was so abrupt—she cocked her head to the side, winked. “So tell me: what do you think?”

  We had already gone past her house four times, but each time we approached it she asked if I wanted to keep walking, and each time I said yes. Three more times, she said, and the walls of her house would cave in.

  Her neighborhood was peaceful, quiet. There were no apartment houses, no stores, no garbage cans lining the sidewalks. The private homes were set well back from the road, surrounded by lawns, fancy hedges, large shade trees. The wealthier students from Erasmus lived here, closer to the Midwood High School section, a few blocks from Brooklyn College. It was a neighborhood in which I’d never walked with my father and in which, as far as I knew, Abe had no influence.

  “Do I still make you nervous?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Then you must trust me a little. You must not be afraid of me.”

  “Was I afraid of you?”

  “Are you kidding? When I first went up to you—I’d been rehearsing my line from the time the game ended—I was afraid you were going to bolt away like a frightened colt, you looked so startled.”

  “I played like one. Like a horse. Damn! Why didn’t the last shot go in?”

  “Fate. But you can look at the bright side, too, David Voloshin. Think of it this way: if you’d won the game, you might have lost me. How does it go—unlucky in cards, lucky in love? I mean, if you’d won the game, would I have been brave enough to approach you?”

  She took my hand, rubbed my thumb with hers, gently. We were passing her school again, the elementary school she’d gone to from kindergarten through sixth grade. She led me toward the gate.

  “Come. I won’t bite. A journey to the scene of Gail Kogan’s childhood. A small detour, folks, on the highway of life.”

  I followed her toward the school building, away from the lights. I thought of Al Roth. I’d seen him at the Holy Cross schoolyard a few weeks before, standing near the entrance in his street clothes, leaning against the fence, watching us play. He’d taken me under his wing when I was a kid, had given me pointers, encouraged me. Now he was living at home with his parents, growing fat and pasty-faced. I recalled how frightened I’d been near the end of the game, seeing his face suddenly. Would he come to the schoolyard again? In a few years, would I be like him? Nobody asked him about the fixes. Nobody asked him what he was going to do now that he could never play college ball again, now that he’d never get the chance to play pro ball.