He stares at me blankly. Then the sly grin begins. “How did you find out?”
“Just what is it you do with them?” I ask coyly.
“If you think I’m going to tell you that, you’re crazy!” His laughter. Not the low slap of a wave, but the sound of a young tide rolling up the shore. Carillons ringing over the drumbeat of horses.
That’s when I know things are changing for us.
* * *
We walk in the park that afternoon, holding hands. It is filled with people, different faces, different looks, happy, guarded, shy, aggressive.
“Do you think people are mostly good or bad?” I ask him.
I’ve asked this question before, but I really want to know. There were two reasons: to bring us together in a common belief, and to provide him with one way to get through hard times. “Look at all this beauty. Do you think God is here, in the trees, the sky, the earth … in the people?”
He looks at the boys on the baseball diamond. “They’re still playing. What crazy weather.”
“Please, for once, tell me what you believe in.”
“I believe in you.”
“You are so sweet … It’s because of the Holocaust, isn’t it? Why you might not believe in God? Maybe you know this story already, but I love it and it’s true. In one of the camps, they made a little boy pull the rope that hanged his father. Everyone had to watch, and the inmates were crying and some of them shouted, ‘Where is God?’ A lone voice in the crowd answered: ‘He is up there in the gallows.’”
* * *
It is getting colder now, and foggy puffs of air are coming out of our mouths. I take out the wedding snapshot that I found in the leaves of my old Roget’s Thesaurus, and I show it to Bob.
“Look at us, how young we were! Do you believe those wide grins? I don’t think my lips would stretch that far anymore.
“Uh, I was wondering, in Portugal, when I was joking and laughing with Frankie, did I smile as much as I did back then? Did I look a little bit like this? Like the girl you were once determined to win? I noticed you were watching us.”
He stops and studies the picture. He takes me quite seriously these days, is more responsive. “I think I did see you that way. It’s how I see you now.”
“I see you differently too. I see you as a handsome, strong man whom I was so lucky to get, a great man who belongs not only to me but to the people.”
“I see a girl with a sparkle in her eyes and dimples in her cheeks. No, don’t say that, I don’t like it when you complain that you’ve gotten dimples where they’re not supposed to be. I love them all. The more the merrier.”
I laugh. “I think Frankie brought out the best in us; in a way, he made us remember why we fell in love. Maybe we’d forgotten that.”
“I think we appreciate each other more.” He tickles the nape of my neck. Then he sweeps me with a tender eye: my red coat, my cold cheeks. “You’re my peony,” he says.
I smile, startled. I have never heard him say anything quite like that. Later, I look up the flower and find that devilish but lovable creatures are said to live inside.
* * *
The following Saturday afternoon, the sky went black, then opened up. I was sitting looking at the window with Amy, who was twenty-two and now my friend as well as daughter. We loved rain; it was exciting, coming at us as it did in pin-sized bullets, then shattering into pieces and rolling down the panes.
“It’s funny,” she was saying. “Rain is just rain until you look up close at it and then it becomes something new, a kitten or a ballerina or an octopus. I think that’s the way we all are; we don’t really see other people for what they are.” She rolled her eyes. “Like boys hiding what jerks they are.”
I smiled and nodded. “Well, you’ve got a dad who’s a hard standard to live up to.” Amy and Bob were in the midst of a lovefest, similarly laid-back as they were. “He has a special look he gives you, a special way of making us laugh, like when he said he’d like to wear your little jacket if you didn’t want it anymore.”
“Ha, yeah. He has this perfect sense of how to lighten the load, at least with me. If I messed up in school, I felt he’d still be proud of me. He’s so powerfully conscious of what can happen to you.”
“Amy, that’s very perceptive. He lets everybody keep their dignity, doesn’t he?”
“He doesn’t put people in a place where they have to crawl, even though he has all this authority. He keeps them as his equal. He really enjoys just being.”
“But when he doesn’t, he’ll never tell you.”
“That’s ’cause he knows that his emotions are his own burden. I asked him one time if something was bothering him, and he said, ‘Oh, just something stupid.’ He didn’t want to inflict it on me. He knows if you’re feeling bad, and he uses humor to make you feel better.”
“Yep, he holds things in, and that’s his defense. He’s very complicated.”
“No, he isn’t. Dad’s totally straight. You know who he is and what he’s going to do. He has his little patterns and routines, and they don’t change. It’s what makes him trustworthy. I love to be with him because he doesn’t require anything of you; there’s no pressure, like some people…” She looked pointedly at me.
“Well, he never cared about you doing your homework like I did.”
Amy looked up at the ceiling and grinned. “He used to do my homework. Then he’d show me how to do it. He knew how upset I’d get with algebra. He used to keep my math book!”
“Well, that’s not so commendable,” I said, smiling.
“He’s so secure he’s not threatened by mistakes, yours or his own. If he spills food on his tie or I spill milk on his newspaper, he just laughs.
“Mom, see how the drops come down quickly and they meet the ones coming really slowly from another direction? I think you and Dad are so different you just miss meeting each other. You think he should be mushy gushy, and he’s not that way.” In point of fact, Amy herself was so oversensitive to touch she didn’t even like people to hug her. “He has a different way he shows that he cares. He makes things very simple, gets things down to their essence. He tries to make people happy as best he can.
“But you guys are all lovey-dovey these days for some reason,” she said, amused.
“That’s nice for you to see, isn’t it?”
“It should be nice for you, Mom. He really loves you.”
“I know.” I was beginning to get a deeper understanding of what had happened to Bob and me to bring us so close. If Frankie had mirrored back a picture of who we had been to each other, Amy, the family philosopher, had put me on the trail of who we could be now.
“I see you getting frustrated if he doesn’t talk a lot,” she said. “He would ask me to come next to him on the couch, and just sitting there was enough to have the feeling of him. We just chilled out together.
“Listen, Mom, this is what he does when he loves you: You know how he used to make me pancakes? He’d give me one stack and then another and then another, whether I wanted them or not. He was so happy I was eating them. But I was really giving them to Ivan so Dad wouldn’t be hurt and I wouldn’t feel guilty. All three of us ended up happy.”
Then, suddenly, Amy’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so afraid of his age. That he’ll leave me. Every year I’m really grateful he’s still here.”
My daughter, a young woman, so much younger than me, had already learned one of the greatest of human virtues: gratitude. Expecting nothing from the most important man in her life, she had accepted with joy what he had to offer.
POSTLUDE
Sometimes, you have to take a journey back in order to take it forward. If you are lucky, a third force will come to jolt you into awareness and set you on a course you didn’t know was yours.
That force can take any number of forms. For us it was Frankie, a man who saw us from the outside and led us back in time. The one who moved us forward was Amy, who somehow brought everything into perspective.
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Although Bob and I have contrasting personalities, we thought that we viewed the world from the same lens. Yet there was one essential difference. We had a sense of that difference, but we didn’t know what it meant. Nor did we ever really define it. From language comes light; if you know something vaguely and don’t put it into words, it doesn’t exist.
Love simply looked different to Bob than it did to me. To him it resided in doing, and to me it was about showing and telling. When he met my need for touch, for reassurance, I knew he loved me. If I kissed him and he pulled away before my vision of the kiss was over, I felt alone. But he didn’t experience my aloneness. He thought his love was felt. If he served me blueberries in bed, thought up adventures he knew I’d like, made a call on my behalf, these were acts of devotion. But to me, they just seemed expected.
As for Bob, all he needed was some attention, some little acts of love and concern. What he thrived on was quiet affirmation, gentle caring. Love was in the gesture: setting up his sleep apnea machine, buying him a weather radio on sale, being there for him when he needed you.
* * *
One day, Josh, who had recently been looking for an apartment, told me his dad had suggested he pick a place near our apartment so he could always look after me. Bob had wanted to protect me, without ever telling me.
It hit me like a bomb: all the things he had done, the sacrifices he had made to show me he loved me in the only context he knew how to show me. How he had gone to church when that was the last thing he wanted to do. Enduring the discomfort of eating on the coffee table because I wanted to escape the negative aura of my family’s dining table. Drinking red wine when he liked white just to see the contentment on my face.
When my birthday approached, a big one for me, Bob asked me what I wanted, and I couldn’t think of anything. Once, long ago, I had told him I’d always wanted a hot rod, but I was certainly too old for that now. Besides, our finances then were stretched, and I didn’t want to give him more worry. So this time, I told him what I wanted most was a card with one of his wonderful cartoons and a message inside.
My birthday approached. One morning, I came to breakfast and found a set of keys on my plate.
“Look outside,” Bob said. “There’s a red devil out there.”
I peeked through the window, and on the lawn was a gleaming red convertible sports car.
I stared agape, dropping the keys to the floor. I could barely take in this beautiful piece of art: long, sleek nose, black top, metal spoke wheels, an interior of caramel-colored leather; it looked as if it belonged in a museum. I put my arms around my husband and laughed, then cried. I had received an honor from him, a tribute. It made me shy, humble.
As I was happily wiggling into the bucket seat, I saw him smiling ear to ear and felt such a rush of thankfulness. It was not the car that moved me as much as the love and effort that he had put into choosing it: the reports he must have read on safety ratings, the search for an affordable vehicle with an excellent engine and the accessories he knew I would love—the leather seats, a tough fabric top that could be opened while the car was moving, manual as well as automatic transmission, and most of all the color. He knew I would want it to be a bright tomato red.
* * *
What a paradox that two people can have loved so deeply for so long and yet, in one sense, have been strangers all their lives. No matter how strong the union, there is almost always something missing, something lingering unfulfilled. We hang on to our ideas of what the relationship should be, and the cost is longing. Having recited our vows, we proceed to fight for what we cannot get. This is futile, of course, for the law of resistance decrees that neither one of us will win.
We look inside our partners for our fathers, our mothers, for the chance to complete what was started but never finished. I wanted badly to know my dad and to be known by him: I tried everything to break through his emotional wall and mostly failed. When Bob came along, a man so like my dad, the challenge was reawakened. Self-will is so strong that we can’t stop trying to get what we missed in childhood. And when inevitably our life mates cannot give it to us, we feel rejected all over again.
We don’t see what they can give us, and so we waste it. Determined to get what they can’t give, we ignore all that they can. We become Plato’s leaky jars. In his parable, a person who has too much desire ends up with a jar full of holes. He keeps greedily filling this jar with precious substances, and it keeps leaking, so every time he picks up the jar, it is empty.
This was where our journey forward was taking us: If I could enter Bob’s world and recognize and cherish the love that he was able to give me, and if he could do the same for me, how could our marriage ever be the same?
* * *
I adore my car. It makes me feel free and strong, and Bob has given me that. For just a few seconds, I rev up the six-cylinder turbocharged engine and shoot through the orchards, the car so low to the ground it seems as if we’re going a hundred miles an hour instead of half that. It is the warmest December day in New York history, and we’ve put down the top. I see the little smile on Bob’s face as he looks at me in my sunglasses, my hair flying, cheeks flushed, at one with my car.
When he sees me peeking at him, he shouts over the blast of the engine, “You’re going to kill us!”
I take my foot off the gas, and all on its own this intelligent vehicle glides to a stop. Bob is taking new pleasure in my fancies these days. It makes me feel renewed, perfect in his eyes.
We have gone to the loveliest corner of the orchard, and because I like the idea of it, we’re going to neck. I remember my husband’s stories of dallying among the yellow daffodils that reflected the sun behind his house. So this morning, I found a Jetfire daffodil at the florist, and now I pin it on his collar, just beneath his chin. The flower, with its perfect orange trumpet and brilliant petals, casts a golden glow on his surprised smile.
A zephyr sends the leaves left on the apple trees chattering. The sun beats down, warms our faces. We lean back, safe, comfortable. I take in his features, not with the old slumbering eyes, but finely, closely, as fascinated as I was long ago, watching him sleep. Flared nostrils, the sign of a bold heart; gentle mouth and prismatic eyes: lashless, hooded, deeply set, eyes that kept secrets, disguising even their color. They can cast many hues: the shade of a lazy sky or a clear lagoon or jade waters swallowed by the gray jaws of the sea.
He leans over and tries to nuzzle my neck with his. “Is this necking? Is this what you wanted to do?” he asks in a muffled voice.
“No, silly, like this.” I plant little kisses around his face, putting one on the tip of his nose and another on his chin. “Just close your eyes and pretend I’m Katharine Hepburn.” He loves Katharine Hepburn.
“I don’t have to,” he says. Then he gives me a long, rather unrestrained kiss that makes my molecules jump up and down.
“Now, isn’t necking nice?” I say, lying in his arms. “We’re both nice and warm.”
I tell him about my thoughts yesterday, my epiphany. “Will you forgive me for complaining so much about you? I wanted us to have deep, earnest talks and share revelations about each other. I know now that this isn’t how you are—it probably isn’t how any man is … I’m afraid I made you think I was disappointed in you.”
“I didn’t think you were disappointed.” He pauses and then points into the distance. “I think you have this ideal out there of what a model husband should be.”
“Well … maybe I do. Hmm, all those times you seemed preoccupied, maybe sometimes you weren’t. Maybe you were sort of getting your own back, because you thought I was just one long harangue?”
“That’s true. Sometimes I stopped listening to you on purpose.”
“I know. I thought you didn’t care about me.”
“I thought you didn’t care about me.”
“Oh no,” I said, sighing. “You thought I didn’t accept you! We’ve both been so absurd. The more I’ve tried to pull stuff out of
you, the more you pushed me away. We’ve taken up battle stations until winning the war has been more important than what we were fighting for!”
We are quiet for a while. My eyes are fixed below on a big withering tree. It has stood majestic since the time of my grandfather-in-law. Now there is only a single shriveled apple on its lowest branch. It will be cut down tomorrow.
“I think you’re angry at me because I got old.”
I’m taken aback. He has finally said it. “What? Oh no, you’re, I … I,” and then the tears come before I can stop them. Alarmed, he takes out his handkerchief, dabs at my cheeks, and holds me. “I think that’s why I’ve been snapping at you. I’ve been taking everything out on you. It’s not your fault you’re getting older. I’m just so afraid of losing you. I always have been.”
He kisses my head. His chin is unsteady; I can feel it through my hair. “Poor sweetheart, I can understand that. But I’m not planning on going anywhere. I have to stay to keep you out of trouble.”
I manage a little laugh, take a long breath, get hold of myself. “It’s not rational. If anything, you’re getting younger. Look at your stress test, better than last year. And your writing, your memory, a million other signs. And besides, since Portugal, I don’t think of you as old.”
“We never used superlatives when I was growing up; they didn’t mean anything and were considered effusive. But I know you need those words, and in spite of it sometimes I’ve dug in my heels. I’ll try to do better, to be more sensitive and more available to you.”
“I haven’t given you much peace, have I?”
“Peace is not what I married you for.” He paused, trying to articulate what I wanted to hear. “I loved your honesty and your determination to do the right thing. I observed you always thinking of something new to say and to do. And I was sure you would stick by me. No, don’t interrupt me. Just listen. I can’t think of what I’m saying when you do that. Yes, I’d get mad at some of your offbeat antics, especially in the beginning, when you seemed very young, but then I guess I was also attracted to them.”
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