Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  He built his studio onto the back of the house four years before, opening up and extending what had been a small unheated work area at the house’s west end—an attached, barnlike room used for storing wood—for a workshop in winter. The skylight above his head lets in an abundance of pale morning light, so that Aaron does not have to use the desk lamp that runs the length of his table. He prefers natural light, always, and in the morning, as now, before anyone else in the house is awake, and especially if the sky is clear and cold, backed, as it were, by an infinite curve of silver, he amuses himself with the thought that the light itself is so brilliantly clear because, given the early hour, it has not yet been much used. It seems pure, fresh, crystalline—endless particles of no color—in a way that corresponds to the sense he has of his own mind at this time of day, before it has had to expend itself on things worldly.

  He loves the stillness, the peace, the thought that in the house that does actually exist behind him—his house—his wife and children lie asleep in their beds, dreaming dreams he will never know. He imagines each of them: Susan on her side, golden hair across her cheek in an S-curve, a strand tucked into the corner of her mouth; Jennifer on her back, headgear strapped behind her neck, silver orthodontic band curving from ear to ear; Benjamin on top of the covers, prone, hugging his pillow, arms rigid; Larry in the middle of the bed, on his side, in the same relaxed position he was in when Aaron kissed him good night; Carl jumbled in his blankets, his small fist against his mouth, the knuckle of his thumb pushing his upper lip, pressing against the gum.

  Aaron prefers cutaway drawings in perspective to floor plans or architectural renderings or paraline drawings; he likes seeing the series of doors and windows that open, one on the other, within a drawing that he has already sliced, ceiling to floor, and entered. He likes seeing Paul and Debbie’s hallway through the severed front door, and the living room through the door that backs the front hallway, and then the smaller door at the far end of the living room that leads to the kitchen and the dining area beyond. The doors and windows, like the staircase, are still partly unrealized—no panes within the windows, no frames around the doors—yet they are whole within his mind, the lines straight and true. At the bottom left he has almost completed a detailed rendering of the front door, six feet high, inch-and-a-half-thick paneled chestnut, vertical sidelights to right and left, a wooden fanlight above. He sands the lead in his compass-pencil to a fine chisel point, draws the outer curve of the fanlight—a semicircle—the curve first, then the straight bottom edge, so that the tangents will match.

  He thinks of Jackie Robinson. Jackie is wearing a double-breasted gray suit and is sitting behind his desk at Chock Full O’Nuts, where he is a vice president. Aaron wishes he could reach out across time and space, run his palm over Jackie’s frizzy white hair. He wishes he could run the edge of his hand across the planes of Jackie’s strong, good face. He is taller than Jackie, and he realizes, to his surprise, that he was taller than him even in high school, during the years Jackie played for the Dodgers. He sees them standing together, his hand on Jackie’s shoulder, the two of them posing for photographs. What are they celebrating? Why is he taller than the man who was his hero?

  Despite all the lead holders and fancy mechanical pencils he owns, he ends up, most of the time, using a common 2H wood pencil, mediumhard, that does not erase easily. Is it the blackness of line that causes him to feel the edge of Jackie’s face? In the newspaper, two days before, he read the item about Jackie’s son volunteering for the Army. Why? Why now? Jack Junior is seventeen years old, and Aaron senses that the troubles the sportswriters allude to—the special school Jack Junior has had to attend—are deeper than they feel free to say. How can it be? After such a long journey and so many hopes, can one lose all if one’s own son…

  Aaron shifts the straight edge of an adjustable triangle from right to left, the tapered pencil-point moving down from top to bottom, creating each individual strut in the window fan. If Jack Junior is shipped to Vietnam, as seems certain, and if he dies there, and if Jackie waits at the airport, hunched in a black overcoat, hands in pockets, reporters around him, to see the casket come off the plane, to identify the body… A line goes over the bottom edge of the window fan. Damn! Aaron feels Jackie’s rage surging through his own body, oceans boiling to steam. Aaron slides the shield down, finds a small square, erases through it, moves the shield, dusts away the pale orange dots of eraser with his drafting brush.

  The front door to Paul’s home is more than 150 years old, yet it is as straight and true today as it was on the day it was first hung. Aaron sketches the details surely, working from top to bottom, using different-size triangles—top rail to frieze panels to frieze rail to middle panels to lock rail to bottom panels to bottom rail. For the house Susan wants, he decides, he will build a door like this, though he will have a hard time getting chestnut. Perhaps he can find enough from an old barn being torn down in the area. The Polish farmers in Hadley and Hatfield do that, to save on taxes, to sell the wood. Aaron likes to knock out the old beams and walls, store them—air-layered—down near the stone wall. Later in the day he and Susan will drive out with the children to look at the piece of property she has found and has fallen in love with—fourteen acres in North Leverett, near the sawmill—and he realizes that he is already, however wary, and only a month after she first mentioned it and they first fought over it, getting used to the idea of buying land, of building on it.

  He stands and stretches. Outside, twenty feet from the window, a chickadee, upside down, moves along the trunk of the silver maple. He slides the glass door sideways, steps out into the cold morning.

  He crosses his arms, rubs them to stimulate warmth, begins to shave the pencil point, to watch the curls of wood slip off, float. There are, he recalls with some surprise, only two children in the house. Benjamin and Jennifer are spending’the weekend with Paul and Debbie. They took their sleeping bags and pillows with them. Aaron imagines them snuggled inside the sacks, wood shavings around their heads. He and Lucius sanded the old floors a week before but have not yet stained or waxed them.

  He sees a shadow in the woods, beyond the stone wall. Is it moving? He shields his eyes to cut the glare of morning light on snow, looks back at the house briefly—his drafting table and filing cabinets framed in the door’s window—then looks to the woods again. The woods are mostly gray, tree trunks and branches specked with wine-red dots of maple buds, with glossy patches of mountain laurel.

  Suddenly the questions swarm: Where will they get the money to buy the land Susan wants? Where, for that matter, will they get enough money to live on if no new houses come along before the fall? And if he gets no new work, what about Lucius? What if Lucius returns to Mississippi? Can he hold Lucius back?

  What of Paul and Debbie? Aaron’s jaw tightens. He regrets having agreed to do the house but knows that nobody talked him into it. His own choice. He hates dealing with Paul, receiving his praise, watching Debbie float by, stoned to the skies. Benjamin and Jennifer come home from visits with Paul and Debbie in moods that foul the air in Aaron’s home. But what else could he have done? Given Susan’s resolve—that the children should have, her phrase, free access to their true father—he thought it might help if he showed that he wanted to cooperate, that he bore Paul no ill will. Still, Aaron will be happy when the restorations are done and he does not have to see Paul. He senses something strange, even sick, going on with Paul and Debbie, but he cannot name it or prove it, and Susan continues to stand firm: Paul is the children’s father, they are Paul’s children. It is right and natural for them to spend time together. How can he argue with her? Would he want never to see Carl or Larry again?

  He tightens his grip on his knife, scrapes the lead to a long tapered point, tests the point against his left index finger. Is it that he somehow connects Paul’s reentry into their life with Susan’s decision to return to work in the fall, to take courses at the university? Susan has been tutoring Lucius on a regular ba
sis, has decided she misses teaching, misses the theater, misses being involved with other people. She has been after Aaron to join her—to take courses, to get a degree. She already has a degree in theater, and now wants to get one in counseling. Does Aaron, she asks, want to spend the rest of his life drawing houses and pounding nails?

  He imagines Susan waking, brushing her hair. Sometimes, when he watches her in front of the bedroom mirror, it is Tony he sees, Tony brushing his hair from his forehead, getting ready to ask a question. But what question would Tony ask?

  Something is moving in the woods. A deer passing through? Aaron tenses. He squints, and before his eyes can register whether what he sees is shadow or form the blade has cut into his left index finger and he watches bright red blood flower from the cut, sees a drop fall and stain the snow, fade to pink. Has he felt pain? All is still. The sun is higher. He recalls, if dimly, waking at night, seeing a shadow on the bedroom door, rocking gently back and forth—Emilie in Gail’s arms, her small head against her mother’s breast. The truth, Aaron admits, is that even if Paul were deserving of his children’s love, Aaron would probably resent him. He turns, goes inside.

  He sucks on his finger, presses down, takes his thumb away and sees that the cut is not deep—a slight crescent, like the hinge of a cuticle, along the right edge of the forefinger. Damn! He puts a Band-Aid over the cut, pours himself more coffee, sits. The cut stings and he knows he should put antiseptic on it, but he does not want to leave his studio; if he stays at his desk and works, he thinks he may, in the silence, be able to retrieve the peace that has been temporarily shattered.

  He closes his eyes, sees Lucius smiling at him. Lucius will be waking now, getting ready to go to church. Aaron imagines Lucius throwing off a blanket, stretching his long brown body. Lucius’s skin seems somewhat pale to Aaron, as if the gray of morning light has dusted it. There is a small community of blacks in Amherst, descendants, for the most part, of slaves who made their way North in mid-nineteenth century, settled in the area as servants, blacksmiths, carpenters. Some of them were free blacks. Lucius enjoys being in their presence. Lucius believes in God. He believes, quite literally, in the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour and Redeemer, and his belief has allowed him to take up Aaron’s suggestion: to move out into the world beyond Aaron’s family. He has even written to Rose and Carrie about his spiritual rebirth, has asked them to forgive him, to think of coming North when he can afford to send for them. But how strange, Aaron thinks, given Lucius’s life, given the brutality inflicted upon him by God’s world, by whites who profess, too, to believe in Jesus. God’s existence or nonexistence does not much interest Aaron—it never has—though he does wonder at the ability of someone with a mind as clear and piercing as Lucius’s—a mind at least equal to his own—to believe and care.

  Aaron opens the sliding door, closes it, walks down to the woods. He turns, sees that the doors to his studio look like silver mirrors. Nothing moves, yet he is frightened. Why? Given what he has already lost, the threats he has had to endure, what could happen now that can have the power to terrify? Still, the question is there: if the dangers from the world are truly gone, will dangers from within now emerge? Will such dangers be worse? Are there dangers there—fears—that he has been able throughout his life to deny, to hide from? He smiles, thinks of how Susan would enjoy knowing that he thinks this way sometimes. When she talks with him about the novels she reads and the psychology books she studies, she argues that of the two sets of dangers human beings are subject to—those from without and those from within—those from within are infinitely more terrifying. Precisely because, she says, they are as infinite and unpredictable as they are mysterious and intangible. Is it so? The danger now, he supposes, is not to his life or to the lives of those he loves but to what he has made of his life. If one of their children should die? If their house should burn down? If he or Susan should become seriously ill?

  Such possibilities, when he imagines them, do not scare him. But in that vague distance he often senses between himself and Susan—that air with no color, that air that also lies, he knows, in an empty room near his heart—there is, still, something that disturbs. But what?

  “Don’t move, mister.”

  He freezes, his hands moving upward instinctively in a gesture of surrender. The voice is husky, assured. Why didn’t he hear any sounds? He walked down to the woods because he saw something move. Why, then, wasn’t he more alert?

  Warm hands cover his eyes, thumbs against his temples.

  “Scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ m sorry.”

  Susan’s hands grasp him about the chest, so that he can feel the length of her body against his own. He turns.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were sleeping.”

  “Benjamin called. He wanted to come home early.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You were working and I didn’t want to interrupt. And—”

  “And what?”

  “And I was afraid that if you went, there might be trouble.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That’s all.” She rests her head against his chest, pushes at his chin with her forehead. “God, your heart is beating so wildly, Aaron!”

  “Tell me.”

  “I think I’m scared now too, just listening to your heartbeat. I am sorry. I only meant to surprise you. Really.”

  He kisses her forehead, her eyes, tells her that it’s all right. He holds her tightly, realizes that what he sees in the empty chamber near his heart is a vial of poison. He imagines a cutaway drawing of the heart, the vial perched now in the upper left-hand chamber. He imagines Nicky reaching inside, taking the vial down, as if from a shelf. He imagines Nicky giving the vial to Gail. He imagines himself watching Gail as she tilts her head backwards, drinks.

  In his dream he is, as ever, able to stand inside dark rooms without fear. But what if, instead of being inside the dark room, the room is somewhere within him? He shivers.

  “Yes?”

  “Sometimes I do get scared,” he says. Can he ask her about the room? If there is a dark room inside him somewhere, what could possibly be hiding in it, he wonders, that could cause him more pain than memory can? “I know it’s irrational, but sometimes I just get scared that everything is going to be taken away from me. You. The children. Lucius. The house. My work.”

  “Oh sweetheart!” She reaches up and kisses his chin, touches his eyes with her fingers. “I am sorry about—”

  “It’s as if there’s this room down here—” he touches his chest “—and as if some little boy who looks like me enters it with a smile on his face and—”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know. Awful things happen, I suppose. But I can’t see them. All I see is blackness, the boy sliding down a dark tunnel. All I feel is the boy’s terror, his heart pounding, bursting—”

  Susan smiles. “Men do fear death as children fear to go into the dark, don’t they? Even if they’re as brave as you are. Your fear’s not uncommon.” She presses her ear against his chest. He thinks of Ellen, when Gail was pregnant, listening to Emilie’s rapid heartbeat. He thinks of Ellen’s fingers, moving gently along the planes of his face. He imagines himself leading her through a house—he and Lucius have framed it, put on the roof—and explaining to her why he does the things he does. He sees her feeling the nails and hammers and saws, touching the beams, searching the air where the walls will eventually go. He sees her beside him, in his studio, and he is describing a drawing to her so that she can, inside the dark room of her mind, draw the house that he has imagined. He sees his father, in his bedroom, sitting patiently while he copies a picture of Pee Wee Reese from Sport magazine. When he shows the picture to his father, his father smiles in an easy and natural way that is surprising. His father’s face seems almost handsome in the halflight that slips in across the fire escape. Half-light, half-life, Aaron thinks. Ellen’s desire, without eyes, to see a world she would never
see—to know exactly what it was like—was this anything like his desire to imagine a life other than the one he had? He must, as a child, despite Abe, have wanted a different life. It was simply that he didn’t believe he would ever know how to get one.

  “Do you remember the first time we spent the night together and you grabbed me—the sun was just coming up—and started trembling because, you said, you were frightened of losing me?” Susan asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I think I knew I loved you then—might love you forever—even though I hardly knew you, hardly knew anything about you. You were so amazing as a lover—it just went on and on and on—and then you were suddenly such a vulnerable little boy.”

  “I suppose.”

  Susan’s body, against his own, is warm. He strokes her hair. He remembers sitting with Tony on the cold hard step in front of his building on Martense Street. He wonders: would Tony believe that Aaron is now living within the life the two of them dreamt of that night so many years ago?

  “Can we go inside?” Susan asks. “I’m starting to get cold.”

  “Would you tell me about Paul and Benjamin?”

  They walk toward the house, holding hands.

  “There’s not much to tell. I went and took care of things and then I came back here. I was upset, I guess, but I didn’t want to worry you. I wanted to think things through by myself first. So instead of going to you I came down here to walk it off, to be alone for a while.”

  “Is Benjamin upstairs?”

  “No. By the time I got there, in fact, I think Ben was sorry he’d called. He didn’t want to admit he’d needed to do so. You know Ben—he hates to admit he ever needs anything or anybody. But it did scare me some.”