Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Maybe something sooner. When I called Susan at noon she said that somebody’s coming by tonight to talk about renovating a big old farmhouse, in Hadley. Says he admires my work.” Aaron feels the sweat evaporate, warming the air trapped between skin and clothing. A vapor barrier. “You’d like that, Lucius—restoring an old house. When you cut into the walls and floors, get past the lathing, tear away a chimney and see the innards—building the house backwards in your mind is the way I think about it, from the inside out—that does make the blood flow.”

  “Well. We want to keep the blood flowing, don’t we? Like the man says, gonna be one long ball-breaking winter—snow balls and blue balls—and me without a woman.”

  “You can sleep a lot. Have good dreams.”

  “Oh yeah. You bet I’ll dream, Aaron. Dream lots. Dreams are what keep us alive, right? I had a dream. Sure. I had a dream that someday the sons of black sharecroppers would lie down with the daughters of white millionaires. Oh yes, Lord. I had a dream….”

  Lucius laughs. Aaron looks out through mists of white, imagines a fawn and its mother staring back at him, bending over to pick at grass, at tufts that rise through the snow like green hair.

  “There’s a bone in the middle of a deer’s heart. Did you know that?”

  “Coon got one in his dingus, makes a good toothpick. You know that?”

  “The truth, Lucius,” Aaron says, laughing easily, “is that the winters are long and dark and cold here. You should think about that part of your life too.”

  “Don’t do much some evenings but think on it. Trouble is, my boss works me so hard, all I want to do at the end of day is to lay down my weary bones and sleep.”

  Aaron makes suggestions he’s made before, ever since he brought Lucius back with him at the end of August: that Lucius consider enrolling in courses at the university; that Lucius go to S.N.C.C. meetings or C.O.R.E. meetings; that Lucius do something so that his entire life does not filter through Aaron’s life, so that he can begin to meet and know other people and families, so that he can meet women.

  “Blow it out your ass with that line,” Lucius snaps. “You white guys been in the Movement get me, plugging all the white and black ass you can all summer long, then reaching out your hand to help us poor niggers, except we gotta do our plowin’ in black soil only. Damn! You don’t know shit sometimes, Levin, you’re so fucking pure.”

  “Pure?”

  “Yeah. Pure. You probably the only guy down there, all them babes creamin’ over you, who didn’t get anything.”

  “I’m a free man, too,” Aaron says. “And a happily married one.”

  “I know that. Everybody round here knows about your famous happy marriage. Only you got to be human too. Otherwise you put strains on things natural, don’t you see? I mean, when I was married, what I said was, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m married, only I ain’t a fanatic about it.’”

  They ride in silence, south along Route 5, Aaron concentrating on the driving, on the dots of color in the landscape: crimson, pea-green, gray, orange. The houses are closer to the road now, closer to one another. Aaron thinks of replying, of saying that he’s human enough, that being married to one woman—one interesting woman—for eight years is no easy thing, but his mind veers to something else.

  “Do you want to go back?” Aaron asks.

  “Sometimes.”

  “You miss Carrie?”

  “Not much.”

  “The child?”

  “Some.”

  “Well.” Lucius is Rose Morgan’s cousin and Aaron knows Lucius can trust Rose to keep an eye on Carrie and the boy. “You’re a free man too now. If—”

  “Oh shit on that, Aaron. A free man. Come on!”

  “If you want to go back home, I’ll take care of it. The money, I mean.”

  “Is that a promise or a threat?”

  “Neither.”

  “You still gettin’ them calls about me?”

  “What calls?”

  “You know what calls. Susan told me—nasty calls about all I been doing to your wife and daughter, what you been doing to me, what I been doing to your boys—”

  “I didn’t know Susan had told you.”

  Lucius shrugs. “I didn’t know she kept anything from you. Thought you two shared everything—no secrets—the famous happy marriage you got.”

  “There’s lots about me that Susan doesn’t know, or have to know.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” Lucius says. “Relieved too, you want the truth. Only there’s something else I been wanting to tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was never married. Not legal anyway. Rose must have told you.”

  “No. But I figured.”

  “You did?”

  “Do you think a man as pure as Aaron Levin would have taken someone North who was abandoning wife and child?”

  “I been sending money back home for the boy—to Rose—only the main thing is that I wouldn’t put a bet on him being mine.”

  “So? What difference would that make?”

  “The difference is some men ain’t so bighearted like you. They get a son, they want that son to be son of their blood, see? The difference is all men don’t feel about kids not their own the way you do about Susan’s.” Lucius pauses. “Anyway, jealousy’s never been one of my depths. I look at that boy and I think of all the men been in Carrie’s body.”

  “Why did you marry her then—stay with her?”

  “Never married her, didn’t you hear me? Don’t you listen, man?”

  “I listen.”

  Aaron turns off Route 5, heading west. He is pleased to be able to get a rise out of Lucius. He loves the easy way they have of bantering, teasing, and of how their conversations will suddenly, unexpectedly, become serious. When they work, eight and ten hours a day, they rarely talk, except about the business at hand. Aaron waits, knowing that if he does, Lucius will speak. Aaron feels warm and drowsy, safe within the van, the van safe within its dome of snow. The snow is less wet now, the flakes larger, falling more densely. If the snow sticks, the children will be able to go sledding in the morning. Aaron imagines Lucius on the toboggan with his children, all six feet three inches and 220 pounds of him bundled in wool and down, his coal-black face swathed in bright Scandinavian colors. He thinks of Tony and Regina, in the subway, heading for Coney Island, Regina bundling close to Tony for warmth, and he realizes that Tony will never be able to see Aaron’s drawings—how good he’s become—and that he will never be able to tell his friend Lucius about his friend Tony.

  Lucius sighs. “All right. Story time, then?”

  “Sure,” Aaron says. “I’d like that.”

  Lucius shrugs, as if to shake off the last of his anger. “Why I stayed with her, crazy as she was? Took the easy way out maybe. My old man used to say, why go hunt up some new woman and get her broke in right when you already got one in your bed? After all the shit I lived through in prison, it was good to be with somebody wasn’t wanting something from me every minute of my life. It was good not to be scared. She was good to me, Aaron. Real good. Kind. You seen that.”

  “Yes.”

  “What you didn’t see was why everybody was so surprised, why they thought she was crazy. What everybody knew about her—why they couldn’t figure me and her together—was how, from the time she started dropping her drawers for whatever came along, she used to have this thing, see, where if a guy came too soon or wasn’t doing it the way she liked, she’d pull out this little penknife, stick it in the guy’s ribs, make him stay there till she got what she was after.”

  “Freedom now.”

  “You got it.” Lucius laughs. “Only problem was, it ain’t easy for a guy to keep it up when he got a knife in his ribs. By and by, when they found out she was doing the same thing to them all, the guys got wise to her, they just started in beating up on her and I guess I wound up feeling sorry for her, dumb me. See? I ain’t so much unlike you as I make out when it comes to wanting to help the colore
d people. Oh yeah. So when I come on three guys knocking the shit out of her back of the high school one night, her screaming like a cat with its ear ripped off, I let loose, picked up two of them at once, banged their heads together, then took the other guy and heaved him at the wall, broke bones.

  “Well. Our size count for something once in a while, Aaron. And Carrie, by the time I got her fixed up she started being so sweet and good to me—thanking me, loving me up, telling me how she gonna change, how if anybody pulled something on me she gonna kick their ass—I just found myself staying on with her. Seemed easy. The real crazy thing was how I got to like her more than anyone I knew, how we could talk with each other, say all we wanted to without being scared. First time I ever had that with somebody—what I guess I got with you, brother—so when the kid started showing, and her telling me every day I better move my ass out or people gonna think it was mine, I just said ‘Fuck what people think,’ and stayed on.”

  “But you don’t want to go back to her? You don’t ever think about going back?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ m sure.”

  “Not to your own family either?”

  “My old man, I see him again, I might kill him, make the buckle on his belt mighty sharp first.” Lucius smiles slowly. “Know that belt well. Too well. Only I figure I gonna do something like that, I save it for somebody worth killing.”

  The porch light is on, and in the amber haze Aaron stamps his feet on the black rubber mat, pushes the door open, enters. They are assaulted at once, Carl on Aaron’s back, Larry all over Lucius, both boys shouting that there is a surprise waiting in the living room—someone—and Aaron has to guess who it is. Susan touches Aaron’s ear with her knuckles, lovingly, kisses him, remarks on the crazy weather, on how bitter cold it is. Didn’t Aaron wear a hat? Was their space heater working? Aaron jokes with Lucius about Jewish wives being Jewish mothers to their husbands, and Lucius smiles, accepts a kiss from Susan, blows into his hands, the palms bright pink like the insides of conch shells.

  Aaron is pleased to be home. His nostrils quiver, take in the fragrances of things baking: potatoes, he guesses, and a pork roast. Buttermilk biscuits. His eyes take in color: forest-green carpeting, blue and purple Venetian glass in the bay window, ivory-white drapes, a brass menorah and silver spice box on a cherry wood table, a rose-colored smoked-glass fixture suspended from the ceiling, brightly colored hand-woven pillows on the window seat. Susan is happiest, Aaron knows—despite all her worldly talents—when she is in their upstairs bedroom alone, looking out at the backyard, working at her sewing machine, making things for the children or the house. He listens to her tell him about her day, about how peaceful it was until the children arrived home, about how they were excited by the sudden snowfall, and as she talks, leaning against the doorjamb, her head tilted, her cheek on the back of her hand, he is struck again, as if for the first time, by how extraordinarily beautiful she is.

  Whenever he is away from her for more than a few hours—whenever he leaves home and returns, if only on an errand—it always seems a small miracle to him that this woman, who is more beautiful than most movie stars—a talented actress who, before she had children, probably could have been a famous movie star—is there waiting for him, that she is happy to see him, that she loves him, that she is his wife. How can it be? Sometimes when he tells her how lucky he feels—to have her, to have the family they have—she becomes annoyed, tells him that she is only a woman who happened to be born with the features she was born with. Were she not so physically beautiful, she will ask, would he love her as much?

  Still, when he is with her, he often feels somewhat adrift, as if he is a small boy who needs to ask her permission for things. Why? She talks with Lucius now, laughs with him about snow, then bends down and explains to Larry that Lucius has never seen snow before. As good a wife and mother as she is, Aaron often feels that there is a curious distance between them—air—that they remain, in part, strangers, that they are never as easy with one another as she is with the children, and it occurs to him that this is so not only because they have chosen, he more than she, to hold back their full histories from one another—who they were and what they did before they met and fell in love and married—but because when he is with her, her beauty allows him to forget what he often feels when they are apart: that there is something missing. It is as if, he will imagine, she is not solid all the way through—as if several layers down there are air chambers instead of organs, tubes instead of bones—and he has to ask himself if he is only, when he feels this way, to use one of Susan’s favorite words, projecting. The truth, he knows, is that he cannot imagine, no matter how good his new life seems, ever being able not to feel that he is the one who is hollow, that some part of him is missing.

  Susan moves to the alcove, between the foyer and the kitchen, inviting him there, he knows, and he goes to her, tells her that he and Lucius will have drinks—bourbon on ice, with a splash of water—and as she turns to him, smiling, he seizes her wrist, presses her against the closet door, lifts her honey-colored hair with the side of his hand, nuzzles at her neck. She hums, embraces him, takes his chin with her hand, kisses him hard. She pulls back, shows him her forearm, where the goose flesh has risen. She tells him that she misses him, and he laughs, tells her he is there. Her eyes are a strange winter shade of blue—almost transparent, like thin ice at dusk. She has never seemed more lovely, and when he thinks this he realizes that in another part of his mind he has been imagining that it is Tony and not Lucius who has come home with him, who is watching him and smiling. Poor Tony.

  The children jump on them, try to pry them apart, tell him to hurry and come with them, to see who is waiting in the living room. Can he guess?

  “You go—I’ll be right there with the drinks,” Susan says. Her eyes show puzzlement. Is she warning him of some danger? Have there been more calls?

  He enters the living room and Paul Steiner smiles, rises from the couch, hand extended. Aaron hesitates, startled momentarily by how handsome and healthy Paul looks—as if time has gone in reverse—then moves forward, shakes Paul’s hand.

  “Good to see you, Aaron. Good to be here.”

  “How are you, Paul?”

  “Better. Much better.”

  Aaron nods. He does not, he realizes, want Lucius to sense his tightness. “I see that. I’m pleased for you.”

  Jennifer and Benjamin, waiting politely, come forward now, kiss Aaron, but he knows that they can sense his unease in Paul’s presence. Benjamin sulks. Aaron turns, introduces Lucius to Paul, says that Lucius works with him. Paul tells Lucius that the children have been singing his praises.

  “Will you show uncle Paul your scars?” Larry asks Lucius.

  “Not now,” Paul says, touching Larry’s head, with affection. “Not now.”

  “I told him about the scars you have on your back from being whipped in jail. But I bet in a fair fight you would of busted those guys good, right? You’re as strong as Daddy—”

  “Lucius comes from Mississippi and he was in jail because he stood up for his rights,” Carl begins, as if reciting a speech for school assembly. “When he entered prison he weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds and when he was finally freed he only weighed one hundred and twenty pounds.”

  “Hey now,” Lucius says. “No need. No need.”

  “Paul is Benjamin and Jennifer’s father,” Aaron explains. “Susan’s first husband. We haven’t seen one another for a long time.”

  “I’ve been away.” He glances at his children, as if for encouragement, and then continues, speaking deliberately. “I wasn’t well, you see. I had some problems and tried to take care of them.” He smiles. “They tell me I did—that I took care of them.”

  “Daddy was in a private psychiatric clinic,” Jennifer says to Lucius. “Many people believe that it’s a sign of weakness to ask for help, but it’s really a sign of strength is what I believe. It took a lot of courage for
my father to say ‘I-have-a-problem-that-I-cannot-solve-alone-and-I-need-help-with-it.’”

  Well, Aaron thinks: she is her mother’s daughter.

  “Jesus!” Benjamin says, turning away. “Why’d you have to tell Lucius? You suck, Jennifer, did you know that? You really do. You’re a real priss-ass.”

  “And you are a narrow-minded immature twit.”

  “But why did Lucius have to know? Jesus—”

  Paul takes Benjamin by the shoulders, bends down so that they are at eye level. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says. “Mental problems are problems too—the brain and the heart are organs just as the kidneys and the lungs are—and if you have problems with your mind and your feelings, you go to the doctors and the places that fix them up.”

  “Just leave me alone,” Benjamin says, pulling away from Paul, striding across the room. “Just leave me alone already.”

  Carl and Larry stare at Benjamin, and in their eyes, Aaron can tell, is the hope that things will escalate—that Benjamin will lose his temper, that he and Jennifer will go at each other, that people will start arguing and screaming, that they will get the chance to gang up on their older brother. Paul is, clearly, upset by Benjamin’s surliness, by being its cause. What Paul lacks in character, Susan has always said, he makes up for in charm. Now that he is less charming—a bit humbled—will he gain in character?

  Paul wears a brown tweed jacket, a button-down shirt, a soft, gray silk tie patterned with wine-red wagon wheels. He looks, Aaron thinks, exactly like the headmaster of one of the local private secondary schools—the Williston School, Deerfield Academy, Mount Hermon, North-field. All he lacks is the pipe in hand, the Irish setter at his knee, the crest on his jacket pocket. In photographs taken during their years together, he and Susan look like the ideal Wasp couple—blond and blue-eyed, patrician, cool—and he knows that this was part of the attraction for Susan: that a man who looked like the head of a Christian fraternity had been born of a mother whose flesh floated up through a chimney in Auschwitz, whose ashes served as compost for hard winter fields. Aaron thinks of the cabbages in the snow, of a man on a tractor, bundled behind a plastic wind screen against the gusting wind. He sees the tractor’s blades grind up the cold earth.