Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  “What scared you?” Aaron stops. “Paul?”

  “No. Paul is Paul. Harmless. Childish. I was scared of Benjamin. Of what to do about his anger.” She shakes her head, as if to clear it. “Okay.” She exhales. “Paul claims that Benjamin tried to kill him—to strangle him.”

  “Maybe he had cause,” Aaron says, and as he does—the words surprise him—something eases in his chest. He puts his arm around Susan.

  “What?”

  “I don’t buy the business about Paul being harmless and childish. The man is disturbed. The man likes to prey on—”

  “Maybe he had cause,” Susan repeats. She begins to pull away, then relaxes. “Good Lord,” she says, her hand to her mouth as if to keep herself from giggling. “You may be right, Levin. Do you know that?”

  “The boy has good instincts. I’ve always said so.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  “Do you agree with what Lucius claims, though—that Paul is evil? That the children shouldn’t be there at all?”

  “No.” She clicks her tongue. “Lucius. Lucius is very much into evil these days. It’s become his favorite word. If I believed Lucius, then I—”

  “Okay. Tell me the rest.”

  “Paul took me aside and said that Benjamin had set his alarm clock—it was what woke Paul—and had tiptoed into his bedroom. When Paul opened his eyes Benjamin had his hands on Paul’s throat.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Partly. I mean, Ben does have an amazing temper.”

  “When provoked.” Aaron shakes his head. “If he wanted to kill Paul he could have gone into the kitchen and borrowed a knife. Listen. Ben’s a smart boy. He knows Paul is too strong for him.”

  Aaron opens the sliding door. They enter his studio. Susan shakes off her jacket, sets it on top of a filing cabinet.

  “Did Ben tell you what he was so angry about?”

  “On the phone he said something about Paul wanting him to dance with him and Jen and Debbie, Paul threatening to send Benjamin home if he wouldn’t.” Susan sits on Aaron’s stool, studies his drawing for a few seconds, then looks up. Aaron sees that her eyes are moist. “Do you know what he said, Aaron? He said that Paul threatened to give him up if Ben wouldn’t do the things Paul wanted him to. Same old Paul—he threatened to send Ben back to our house, to force him to live with me full-time. ‘But he can’t make me,’ Ben said.”

  “Can’t make him dance with them?”

  “Can’t make him leave.” Susan bites on her lower lip, gestures to Aaron to come to her. She takes his hands in hers, kisses the knuckles on Aaron’s right hand, bites lightly on the stubs of his missing fingers. “Why does that move me so, his saying that?”

  “Because Benjamin is Paul’s son, but he’s stronger than Paul. Because Ben would never reject Paul the way Paul rejects him.”

  “He’ll only try to kill him, is that it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh Aaron, you are a smart man.” She wipes tears from her eyes.

  “Only it’s just so hard to know what to do sometimes, with Ben. I try to leave him alone, to let him find his own way, but there’s something about him—do you mind my saying it—that reminds me of Paul, and—” She stops, rests her head against Aaron’s chest again. “I get confused, sweetheart. Sometimes I get confused. About Jen too. Will you tell me why I was so lucky, after Paul, to have found a man like you—a good man, with a good heart—who’s so patient with me, with all my children? Who understands them so well? What can I do, though? If I forbid them to go there, that may only make the idea more attractive and—”

  “And what?”

  “And Paul will always find ways to get to them. When he’s determined to have his way, he’s just like—”

  “Me?”

  “No. Like Benjamin is what I was going to say.”

  She walks to the window. Aaron imagines tender shoots of grass being pressed down beneath their shoes, beneath the thin layer of snow. He imagines the snow melting, the grass bending upwards.

  “Like you too, I suppose.” She talks without looking at him. “I know what the right answer is. The right answer is that I have to trust the children to figure these things out for themselves. Still, I don’t think it would hurt to talk with them later, to let them know I’m worried, to let them know it’s all right with me if they choose not to see their father.” She turns, faces him. Her voice is warm. “You’re very happy when you’re here by yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” He smiles. “Happier than I ever expected to be, in this life.”

  “In this life.” She walks around his drafting table, touches the back of his neck, ruffles his hair. He wonders how it was that, in the cold morning air, her fingers were warm. He imagines her sitting at the base of a tree, thinking about Benjamin and Jennifer. He sees her with her hands tucked between her legs. He thinks of Nicky, in Ohio, sitting on the lawn in front of the tents, singing. You like being a father, don’t you?

  “I like talking with you about the children,” Susan says. “In addition to being smart, you have good sense, Levin. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes I forget that you’re not their real father. Does that bother you still—that they’re Paul’s?”

  “No,” he says quickly. Too quickly? He shrugs. “What bothers me is Paul.”

  “And sometimes I forget about your childhood—that would explain it, wouldn’t it?—that you weren’t raised by a mother and father.”

  “I suppose.”

  She asks if he will show her what he was doing when he interrupted his work to go down to the woods. She says that it makes her feel peaceful—it did this morning—to know that he is here, doing the work he loves. Aaron lays a perspective grid over his drawing, to check proportions, and explains to Susan that in the books they teach you to make your grids on the thicker paper and to lay the drawing on top, on tracing paper or transparent vellum, enabling you to see through to the grid, to transfer the drawing to thicker paper later on if necessary, but that he can’t work this way. There are so many different ways of seeing any house, any one room, so many different ways of drawing them, he says—floor plans, orthographic projections, paraline drawings, exterior elevations, section drawings, perspective drawings, shaded drawings—so many ways of making one’s way into any house, into any room, that he often, as earlier, becomes lost in possibility. The children like the shaded drawings best—they seem more real to them—but Aaron prefers the simpler line drawings.

  Drawings, he believes, should not reproduce the world but should, instead, imagine it into being. He wonders: are there more ways of seeing a house—of imagining one—than of living in one? Does Susan sense that this has been behind his reluctance to build his own home? Susan’s hands are on his shoulders. She kisses the back of his neck. He imagines that Ellen is standing where Susan is, that he is taking Ellen’s hand, guiding it so that she can touch the paper and trace, with a finger, the lines Aaron has drawn.

  “I was thinking,” she offers. “If you don’t want to look at the land later, it’s all right with me. Lucius will be here in about an hour, for his session with me—before church—but if—”

  “We can look at the land.” Aaron pauses, laughs lightly. “We may not buy—not ever—but we can look.”

  “Oh Aaron—do you know how much you please me still, and that I really don’t, as with buying the land, want to take anything away from you?

  “I didn’t say you did. I said that I’m just scared things will be taken away—”

  “Shh. Don’t get upset.”

  Her right hand slips down, inside his shirt. She unbuttons the top three buttons of his shirt, rubs his chest and shoulders slowly.

  “I love you,” she says. “Can we play here, do you think? You won’t be angry? Or I could just stand at the door and watch you work. I could stare at your shoulders, drink in your peacefulness, your strange intensity.” She touches his belt buckle. “Or…”


  He does not want to turn and face her. Although he loves being touched, he wonders how it is that she can be so gentle with him—so in love with him when he has withheld so much from her? He looks down at his drawing, at the white space between the second floor landing and the missing stairs. He tries to stare through the whiteness into the vastness beyond, into all that time and space which is his own life, into a past to which the only bridge, he knows, is memory and pain.

  Sometimes, as now, he feels that his second life—all the years that have passed since he left Brooklyn, along with all the years to come—will only prove to be a rumination on his first life. Will he ever be able to talk with Susan about such feelings without destroying the life they actually have? Why is it so, he wonders—that truth sometimes has the potential to destroy, while lies can save?

  She untucks his shirt. He asks if they have time and she says that she is a practical woman: the boys will watch cartoons when they wake, she has locked the door, Lucius will not arrive for an hour. He touches her hair, kisses her mouth. She licks his lips slowly, as if drawing them with her tongue. She undoes his belt buckle. He is astonished at how much he desires her, at how wonderful it is to feel her hands move across his body, to have her undress him. He lets her guide him. He lies on the floor, face down, rests his cheek against the beige carpeting, and a second later she is lying on top of him, rubbing her breasts across his back. She rises and falls, rolls from one side to the other, and he floats, finds himself entering a region of his memory which, now that he can dwell in it again, surprises him by the fact of its existence. Are the woods still? He thinks of a dead limb, high on a silver maple, imagines it cracking, falling. Silver maples are very brittle. He wonders why it is that it matters to him so much—that it still thrills him after all their years together—that she is such a beautiful woman.

  He smiles, hears his father’s voice. Do you know how come I know I’m the smartest man in the world?

  Susan is breathing hard, caressing him without stop, licking him along the neck, along his backbone, along his buttocks, down along the insides of his thighs. She asks him if he likes playing in his workroom. He says nothing. He knows that she frightens him a bit when she gets like this because he cannot make sense of the strange mixture in her of woman and child. But wasn’t that mixture—of man and boy—what she said she loves so about him? She nibbles at his toes, sucks, bites at his ankles, then begins to move upwards again, hands and mouth at him constantly, lightly. He thinks of her as she was the first time he saw her: at the Three County Fairgrounds, buying cotton candy for Benjamin and Jennifer. She reaches below, and when she moans he hears, a second later, a strange involuntary sound, somewhat higher-pitched, come from his own throat. It was a brutally hot day and it was, he thinks now, something about her very exhaustion that drew him to her, made him bold enough to start a conversation.

  Both yours?

  They’re not yours, mister.

  Her voice was abrupt and hard—like a man’s voice, he thinks; like the voice in the woods—as if because of her beauty she was used to replying this way to men who started conversations with her. The strange thing, though, is that in his memory now her voice sounds like Nicky’s, when Nicky would try to act tough.

  She runs her tongue along his waist in a slight upwards curve, from left to right. She asks him what he likes best, what she can do for him.

  “Are you sure we’re married?” she asks.

  She mounts him, slides down slowly, golden hair falling onto his face. He grabs at her hair, circles a strand with each hand, as if coiling rope, tugs until he knows, from her sweet whimpering, that he is hurting her just enough to please her.

  He is crying. Why?

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  She has been asleep, her head on his shoulder. He has been floating through space—feet forward, body horizontal, as if in a state of levitation. He has been gliding through white rooms whose walls seem to move sideways, the rooms expanding as he enters them, as if perspective has been reversed and the vanishing point is behind his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  She rises onto an elbow, kisses his eyes, his mouth, his chin. “Happy families are not all alike, or all dull,” she says. “Not this one. We’re entitled, Aaron. We’ve paid our price.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Talk to me, Aaron. Please? Tell me why you get the way you do—not the tears and not what you say, but that other look—the distant one, the blank one. Sometimes I feel there’s just so much of you I can never get close to, that I’ll never know about. Tell me why you were frightened earlier. What scares you so, sweetheart?”

  He swallows, touches her cheek, remembers the feel of Emilie’s skin. He sees Abe’s smile, hears Abe telling him that if you were born, like it or not, there was an admission price. Susan licks his cheeks, his eyes, the creases around his mouth.

  “You’re like a woman sometimes, aren’t you—the way you’re affected by our love-making.” She kisses the hair on his chest. “When Paul came back into our lives I was frightened for a while that it might sour things. I was frightened that his presence might make you reject me. I kept feeling you wanted to know all the details of my life with him so that you’d have reason to reject me. When I first met you—I can tell you now—I was scared that no man would ever love me again after all I’d done with Paul, all the crazy things he got me to do.”

  Aaron imagines himself leaning on the railing at the five-eighths pole. Abe is beside him, dressed in white—white shoes, white slacks, white shirt, white hat—smiling. God but he loved the man! He sees Abe move off, start a conversation with a young woman. The woman tilts her head, enjoys being charmed.

  Why had he loved Abe so? Aaron wants to smile, hearing the question again, but does not. Why, when he was a boy, had he loved Abe more than anyone in the world? In the past, when the question has come, he has usually found himself imagining his father’s face, his father’s bad eye, and himself, as a boy, wishing that his father could be more like Abe, more of a man. But what he senses now is that when he was a boy what he really felt when he looked at Abe—when he tried to do something that would please Abe—was a desire to change him. If only he could have loved Abe enough, he must have felt, he could have made him less hard, less severe! If only he could have loved Abe enough, the tenderness he sometimes saw in Abe’s eyes might not have disappeared! If only he had loved Abe enough, the good and sweet man he knew was there might have shown himself more, might have lived, might have believed it was possible to have lives other than the one he had!

  What he wanted, he realizes, was to be able, with his love, to cause the sweetness that was there for him occasionally—in the way Abe would smile, or ruffle his hair, or ask to see his drawings, or tell him a story—to linger and spread. Was it because he believed, as a boy, that his love was inadequate—that it could never change Abe or Abe’s life—that he was afraid, except indirectly, to show his love, that he never allowed himself to know just how much he had cared?

  “You had choices,” Aaron says to Susan. “You could have refused.”

  “Oh Aaron, I was so young—and I did love him. He was a wonderful man in many ways and—” She sits up. “Then you are still jealous. You do still disapprove, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” He blinks. Abe is gone. “No. Not when I think about it. If you hadn’t known Paul you wouldn’t be the person you are. You wouldn’t be the woman I fell in love with. I’ve thought about that: if I love you, then I love the history you bring with you.”

  “Too easy.” She lies down again. “I’ll accept the answer for now, though. I’ll try to believe that you want to believe what you say and that maybe if you want to enough, you’ll come to feel—”

  “Stop.”

  “Are you afraid that I’m still the same woman who once loved him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Sure you are. And if I am, then what about you, Aaron? If you’re afraid of that in me, what are
you afraid of that’s analogous in yourself? You chose me, after all, knowing about Paul. I mean, if I chose a man like that once upon a time, what was wrong with me? What might be wrong with Benjamin and Jennifer? What might still be wrong—?”

  He looks toward the glass door, toward the grass and the snow and the woods. He is certain now that Paul, voice muffled by handkerchief, has made some of the threatening phone calls. But why? Merely to frighten Aaron? If he were in Brooklyn, he thinks, he could have one of the guys—Lefty or Monk—tap into the lines easily enough, trace the calls.

  “How much time until Lucius comes?”

  “We’re all right,” Susan says. “We’ll hear the children. They’ll knock first. The door is locked. Lucius will entertain them. You have your clothes. I have mine. Don’t move yet, all right? Listen to what I really think, Aaron. Sometimes, sweetheart—sometimes I feel you’re angry with me not for anything I’ve said or done but for being who I was when neither of us knew the other even existed. Sometimes I feel what you really want is for me to justify all those years, and it occurs to me, happy as I am, that I’ll be damned if—”

  “Shh.” He kisses her forehead. It’s just that I never expected to be this happy, he wants to say. To have a home, children, a wife. If we’re distrustful of others, he imagines her saying next, as she has before, it’s usually because we don’t trust ourselves. It hurts to realize that they will have no choice but to leave one another in a few minutes. He wishes he could hold to her forever. “Do you ever miss things before they’re gone?” he asks.

  “Before they’re gone? I don’t understand.”

  “Sometimes when I look at Carl or Larry my stomach sinks, feeling their future absence, imagining them at eighteen or twenty or twenty-five—”

  “Early loss,” she says. She touches his mouth with two fingers. “I was reading a book about orphans last week—I almost drove out to the house where you and Lucius were, just to tell you—and one of the orphans—they’re all grown men, older than you, and they have reunions, play touch football together—one of them says that the home they grew up in ruined them all somehow for adult life. ‘We gave one another things families don’t give to each other anymore,’ he says.” She sits up, begins to dress. “Is it so, Aaron? When your eyes cloud over and begin to move backwards inside you, do you feel the same way? Are you remembering some life you used to wish you had? Or resenting the life I had when I didn’t know you existed? Talk to me about what it was like for you, Aaron. Was it like that—like what the man in the book says?”