Love Begins in Winter

by Simon Van Booy

  Brian has a younger sister, Martha. I met her once at a concert in Irving Plaza. Perhaps because she isn’t pretty, she had decided to be ironic and make her body the canvas for a series of strange tattoos, one of which is an artichoke.

  Brian’s mother, Jennifer, was once physically beautiful. In the photographs which dotted the living room of their Hampton Bays summer home, she looked perpetually overjoyed—her mouth painted and open like a rose moving its petals.

  The night Brian and I arrived in Hampton Bays we kissed in the car before going in. It’s something we do. We are always kissing. Brian stopped abruptly when he suddenly noticed the house was in darkness.

  “That’s strange,” Brian said. “There are no lights on.” I sensed something was terribly wrong.

  Jennifer’s eyes were so puffy I felt awkward looking at her. I quietly asked Brian if he wanted me to examine them. He said they always puffed up when she was upset, but he’d never seen them like this.

  Alan, Jennifer’s husband, had walked out that afternoon. He returned from his tennis match and started packing a suitcase. A woman in a convertible picked him up. She waited at the end of the driveway with the engine turning over. He said he wasn’t coming back. He said Ken, their lawyer, would sort out the arrangements. Jennifer chased after the car and threw her shoes at it. Then she walked home. They had been married for thirty-four years. They were married the year I was born.

  Brian’s father was fifty-seven years old when he left Jennifer. Alan’s father, the Jewish tailor, was fifty-seven when he died of a coronary thrombosis. It was a psychoanalytical cliché, but I kept quiet and said nothing to Brian—even intelligent people go nuts around their parents.

  I asked Brian again if he wanted me to examine his mother and he said no—that they had a close family friend, a Dr. Felixson, that his mother trusted and who was at his summerhouse in Southampton. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “Let’s just get through tonight,” he said. “You should meet this guy anyway—he wrote a book back in the seventies on pediatrics or something.”

  “Really,” I said.

  As I waited outside in the darkness for the doctor, Brian came out with a copy of Dr. Felixson’s book, The Silence After Childhood. It was an odd title. I said I would read it. Then Brian told me he’d known about his father’s affair. Apparently, Alan had confessed over dinner several months ago. Jennifer had been visiting her family in Florida. Brian thought I would be angry with him for not telling me. But I wasn’t.

  “What man could resist the opportunity to live twice?” Brian said his father had pleaded. He perceived his son’s silence as reluctant approval, but in truth, Brian was disappointed. He finally had to admit his father’s cowardice. The marriage to his mother had never been harmonious, but he’d stayed in it. Brian said that if his father wasn’t such a coward, he would have hurt Jennifer thirty years ago, instead of hurting her and humiliating her after three wasted decades.

  “But then Martha wouldn’t have been born,” I said. Brian was silent for a moment. I thought he was mad at me, but then he said that regardless of his sister, his father had stolen his mother’s life.

  “But Jennifer let him steal it,” I added.

  Brian nodded. I think he appreciated my frankness, but I shouldn’t have said it then.

  The doctor arrived in an old station wagon. A kayak was tied on the roof. He got out and waved. Then he opened the trunk and reached for his bag.

  He was a tall, thin man who looked as though he could have been a nineteenth-century Midwestern farmer. His unkempt white hair and strange side-to-side walk gave him the appearance of being drunk. He was born and raised in Stockholm. He’d moved to New York in the 1970s. He wasn’t married.

  “Brian, my boy, sorry to see you under these circumstances, but we’ll sort this out together,” Dr. Felixson said quietly. He walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Then he said, “What madness has driven you to retrieve a copy of that book you’re holding?”

  Before disappearing inside, he turned around and said, “Brian tells me you both went to Stockholm, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was beautiful, but it didn’t snow.”

  “Times change, I suppose,” he said.

  One night, maybe our third date. Brian and I lying in bed. The room sketched by moonlight. The street outside in a deep sleep. Snowing and we didn’t even know.

  Brian said he and his sister had trembled with fear at his parents’ arguments. “They screeched like birds,” he said.

  Brian said he would never get married. I hesitated. Years of adolescent sleepovers had engraved images of the perfect day. In truth, I hadn’t thought about marriage for years.

  Brian sensed my fear. He reached for my hand under the blanket. I gave it to him. He was no coward—maybe that was worth a thousand perfect wedding days.

  Brian believed that marriage often gives one party the license to behave intolerably without the fear of being abandoned because the state must oversee any separation. He said that with many couples he knew, either the husband or the wife had waited until they were married to really hang out their dirty washing. He believed that marriage was an outdated concept, like circumcision in gentiles.

  “But not in Jews?” I said.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he said, but in a kind way, as if to say I had a point too.

  The next day we went to McCarren Park and built a snowman. A young Hispanic boy helped us with the finishing touches. The boy held my hand for a while. Then he said Brian and I should get married. Brian looked at me and laughed, then asked him if he’d settle for a cup of hot chocolate at the Greenpoint Café. The boy said he would. I had wanted Brian all to myself but loved how he was so inclusive. I suggested the boy call his mother and tell her where he was. I gave him my cell phone. Later that night, I noticed there was no new number on my call list. The boy had just held the phone to his ear and talked.

  That was one of the nicest days I’ve ever had with anyone. Later we went to a fondue restaurant and then stayed up all night drinking and listening to Getz and Gilberto. I remember dancing. Brian watched.

  A week later when the snow melted, we decided to go to Sweden for a long weekend. It cost more than we thought because you forget to include things like car service to the airport and then the money you happily waste in duty-free. We were both in graduate school, so it took us a year to pay the trip off. I remember we held hands on the flight. You can’t put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can’t have one without the other.

  Dr. Felixson examined Jennifer in private. We heard her crying. Then we heard Dr. Felixson’s voice. It sounded like he was talking to Brian’s father on the phone. Before he left, he said that we should call him if we had any questions and that, with any luck, we’d all live through this. I was too tired to get one of my cards from the car, and so I said I would send him an e-mail. Of course, I never did.

  Soon after Dr. Felixson left the house, his sedative began to pull Jennifer out to sleep like a tug silently towing a ship out to sea. She mumbled that if Alan showed up or called back, to tell him she was dead. I nodded.

  Then she lay down on the couch, and the sedative pulled her under so violently that she began to snore a few moments after closing her eyes.

  I was surprised I understood why Jennifer couldn’t go into the bedroom and lie down. I covered her up with another blanket. Body temperature drops at night.

  Brian came over and put his arm around me. He turned off the lamp and kissed me. Then suddenly I felt strange.

  I pulled away.

  He sat there for a moment.

  Then he kissed my forehead and went outside. I heard him drive away. He wasn’t mad, because we understand one another—like two maps pressed together in a book.

  It was either the semidarkness of the room or the smell of late summer pushing at the screens—or even the fabric of the couch on my bare
legs. All these things in that moment seemed like props arranged by my memory to suddenly transport me to a moment which had long passed.

  The exactitude of feeling two years old flickered inside me. I kept very still. I felt like primitive man having inadvertently made fire and wishing, more than anything, to keep it burning just a few moments longer.

  It’s as if my two-year-old self had been living inside me like the second smallest piece in a set of Russian dolls. It now rose to the surface of my consciousness, and I felt with absolute clarity how it felt to be two years old on one particular day in the 1970s.

  My parents had taken me to the park across the street from our house because it was my birthday. There was a party; other children came. The other children weren’t my friends; they were just other children. My parents were my best friends, which was why it was so hurtful when they reproached me.

  My feet suddenly rose off the floor, pulled up into my shrinking body. I could feel the scabs on my knees like small islands. I pushed my tongue into the spaces where I had no teeth. Dry birthday cake. Juice with crumbs in it. Mild nausea. I pictured the candles, but the feeling was stronger than anything I could visually recall. It was as though I were there but without my eyes or my sense of touch. I remember running through tall grass. I can feel it brushing against my legs like long, thin arms. The other children’s high-pitched cries. Presents lowered from large, foreign hands.

  The end of the party. I didn’t want to go home. I was frustrated that everyone was separating. I wanted the day to rewind itself. Then I remember chasing a boy. My parents calling me. His parents watching us, grinning, encouraging us. He falls, turns over laughing. I’m laughing too. I come upon him. I take his arm and bite into it. Blood appears from nowhere and spreads on his skin. He looks at his arm. He screams and parents scramble. He is scooped up like a bug. I want to say that I am a tiger and tigers bite. I want to remind them I can be a tiger. His face turns red as he is pulled up into the nest of his mother’s arms. I sense the tone of crying change from shock to something else. He lifts his arm. His mother kisses it. She rocks him. His father stands erect, on guard, looking around, helpless, pathetic.

  I am rooted to the spot by fear. Then suddenly my diaper is yanked down. I recoil but am held in place as my mother’s hand clips my bottom. The crack of her hand against my flesh. My little body making forward jerks with each smack. My disgruntled face, my curling lip like a glistening crimson wave.

  My eyes are open, but I am almost unconscious with shock and humiliation.

  I can feel wind on the exposed flesh of my bottom. My mother walks away. I am burning with emotions too great for my small body. I am undressed in public. There are spots of blood on the grass. People gather around and peer down at me sadly.

  I overhear a woman ask if I am a boy or a girl.

  I am too scared to pull my diaper up.

  My mother has walked away.

  My father carries me across the field toward our house. As soon as he pulled my diaper up, I defecated into it. He rubbed my head. My mother stayed at the park with her arms crossed. She had taken off her fancy shoes.

  My father said: “You cannot bite—biting is wrong.” But there was no passion in his voice. Then we reached the house.

  He put me in their bedroom. He closed the blinds, but ribs of light fell through and settled upon the floor as though I were in the stomach of some celestial being. My father stripped me down to my diaper. It was full of feces. I was too afraid to cry. I wondered if I would be killed without knowing what death was. The fabric of the chair stuck to my tiny, fleshy legs. It was my birthday. I was two. Sweat had dried across my body like a veil.

  Later, a plate of birthday cake was left outside the door.

  “What if she’s sleeping?” my father whispered. “She won’t be,” my mother snapped.

  I didn’t want the cake. I wanted my mother to forget herself and remember me. Eventually they brought the cake into the room. I ate it and cried and sat between them and repeated over and over mechanically that biting was wrong. But deep down I still loved the boy and would have bitten him again and again, forever. And he knew I loved him. And it was pure and spontaneous.

  And so I became a pediatrician. I wanted to be a hand that’s lowered to souls dangling off the cliff in darkness.

  About two years after Brian and I found Jennifer on the couch in Hampton Bays, I finished Dr. Felixson’s The Silence After Childhood. I read it in one sitting. It was 3 AM on Monday morning. I picked up the phone and called Brian.

  “I have just read Dr. Felixson’s book.”

  There was silence and then Brian said:

  “See what I told you?”

  “Do you want to come over?” I said.

  “Don’t you have work in a few hours?”

  “Jesus, Brian.”

  “Okay, okay—I’ll bring my clothes for tomorrow.”

  I was trembling. Dr. Felixson’s insights had set off small earthquakes in my body. They were spreading to my memory like soft, warm hands eager to unearth buried things.

  When Brian arrived, I sat him down, kissed him, thanked him for coming over, and handed him a glass of whiskey. I opened the book randomly and read a passage.

  “Listen to this,” I said.

  To children, parents can seem like blocks of wood—or at best, sad creatures that seem always on the verge of not loving them. Later, we adults learn that our parents are consumed with neuroses they’ve manifested as seemingly real problems to draw the spotlight away from a more painful reality. . ..

  I closed the book and opened it to another page. Brian leaned forward.

  There’s no going back to childhood unless you’re somehow tethered to it and can feel the weight of it against your body like a kite pulling at you from its invisible world; then you will understand everything through feeling, and the world will be at once tender and brutal and you’ll have no way of knowing which on any given day. And you’ll love everyone deeply but learn not to trust anyone. . ..

  “Wow,” Brian said. “Dr. Felixson wrote that?”

  “I thought you’d read this?”

  He looked up. “It’s been in our house for so long. I always meant to,” he said.

  I turned several pages and let my eyes fall into a paragraph:

  Childhood is terrifying because adults make children feel as though they are incomplete, as if they know nothing, when a child’s instinct tells her she knows everything. But then perhaps the most damaging crimes in a society are committed by most of its citizens and perpetuated unknowingly. . ..

  Jennifer is now living in Florida. She is writing her memoirs. She is seeing someone. He’s Italian Italian, she says, and he’s apparently related to Tony Bennett and has the family voice. Alan lives year-round in Hampton Bays. His relationship fell apart a few months after he left Jennifer. He tells Brian he’s “playing the field.” He’s started wearing cologne. I often wonder if Jennifer and Alan were as close as Brian and I are.

  I know Brian has wondered if I’ve thought about whether he would leave me in the same way. But Brian is not like his father. Brian is a beautiful child, but he’s not childish. Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them. I think it happens quietly to every one of us—like crossing a state line when you’re asleep.

  Brian and I may part one day, but it’s not really parting—you can’t undo what’s done. The worst wouldn’t be so bad—just the future unknown. Though I would carry a version of him inside me. But isn’t every future unwritten? The idea of fate is really only a matter of genetics now. But what’s interesting is how so many significant events in my life have come from seemingly random things. Freedom is the most exciting of life’s terrors:

  I’d decided on whim to walk into a bookstore. There was Brian.

  I wonder if I had never met Brian, what I would have thought about all the times I’ve thought about him. Would my head have b
een empty of thoughts? Would it have been similar to sleep? Or would other thoughts have been there? Where are those thoughts now, and what would they have been about?

  I’ve thought about these sorts of things since I began editing the unpublished writings of Dr. Felixson. A few days after finishing The Silence After Childhood, I tried to call him. A woman renting his old surgery space said he’d died.

  I had more than forty pages of questions.

  Unbeknownst to Brian, Jennifer had come into possession of some of Dr. Felixson’s journals. I discovered this when I called her in Florida. I wanted to find out more about his life. There was singing in the background. Jennifer giggled and asked if I could hear it. I explained the effect Dr. Felixson’s book was having on my life. She asked if Brian was there. He was. She asked to speak to him. She then explained to her son how she and the doctor had experienced a brief affair several years before Alan left her. The marriage had never been the same after. Brian was so shocked he hung up. Jennifer immediately called back and said she would have spared him, but she wanted to explain why she had only some of Dr. Felixson’s journals. In his will, Dr. Felixson had left Jennifer the journals covering the period of their togetherness.

  In a gesture of kindness and courage, Jennifer sent them all to me from Florida via UPS. She said that what little had been written about her was nothing compared with the notes he’d made on his patients and his general everyday thoughts.

  “He writes about everyday things like clouds,” she said.

  She was adamant that they be in the hands of another doctor. I felt truly honored.