“Do I turn here?”
“Look at the sign.”
“Jesus, this isn’t it.”
“There! There! The goddamn sign. Are you blind?”
He wouldn’t let himself look at either of their faces as the car jerked to a stop. He knew he would see fear in them, and even more, anticipation: even if they, too, realized he wasn’t dying, they’d also realize it might not be the case next time. And maybe that was what made him say, without having been conscious of thinking it, “The key to the safe deposit box. Taped to the underside of my sock drawer.”
“We should have eloped,” Joy said from the front seat.
Cynthia said, close to his ear, “Shut up, both of you.”
When he finally did open his eyes, flat on his back in an examination room, lights scorching overhead, a doctor bent over him, gloved hands probing his groin, he wished he’d kept them shut. He’d imagined only Cynthia had followed him in, but there was Joy standing beside her, staring openly at his exposed middle. Instinct made him try to cover himself, but the doctor batted his hand away. Both Joy and Cynthia wore tank-tops, shorts, flip-flops, their nails—finger and toe—painted the same burgundy shade as the bridesmaids dresses hanging beside the tux in his closet. Even without Aziz’s arm around her, Joy looked smaller than she should have, and he wondered if she’d lost weight. Or was he simply seeing her now as she’d always been? Cynthia, too, looked shrunken, though she was rounder, her bare shoulders meaty next to Joy’s bony ones. Paired together they produced an odd effect on his vision. Not that he thought he was seeing double, exactly—Joy fair and slim, Cynthia dark and stout—but that he was seeing simultaneously into two different periods of time. His past and present, maybe, or a past he might have had and a present he might lose at any moment. The doctor prodded and shifted, and despite the discomfort, something began to stir between his legs.
An erection? Now?
And still Joy didn’t avert her eyes. Maybe this was her way of getting even: once, when she was home from college for the summer, he’d accidentally walked in on her in the upstairs bathroom, where she stood in front of the mirror in nothing but underpants, picking at something on her face with tweezers. Of course he hadn’t stood there gawking, instead muttering apologies and asking why no one used locks anymore as he stepped out and slammed the door behind him.
The doctor pressed something—a thumb?—under his scrotum, sending another shock of pain through him and cutting short the embarrassing flow of blood. “Incarcerated,” he said, and Paul was delirious enough to believe he was being accused of a crime.
“Jail?” he asked, but the doctor ignored him, speaking instead to Cynthia. The herniated intestine was caught in the muscle and wouldn’t retract. Very dangerous condition if left untreated. Surgery, right away.
“We’ll prep him and move him up as soon as an OR’s ready,” the doctor said.
And because he didn’t want to see the expression on either of the women’s faces, one that would suggest he’d messed everything up, as they’d always expected he would, he stared straight into the ferocious light hanging above him. “I can’t,” he said. “My stepdaughter’s getting married tomorrow.”
A raspy voice answered. “Shut the hell up, Paul.” This time he couldn’t tell if it was Cynthia’s or Joy’s.
Only after he woke, still groggy from anesthesia, did he remember the cake, and he asked Cynthia about it as soon as she came into the recovery room. She shrugged and said, “A little extra icing, and it’ll be fine.” And then he found himself astonished to hear that the wedding was going on as planned. Why would he have imagined otherwise? Guests had already flown in from California, from London, from Iran. “We’ve got to get that girl married before she flips out and runs away with a busboy,” Cynthia said.
He was equally surprised to find out he was being discharged in a few hours. He wouldn’t even spend the night in the hospital. They’d send him home with a wheelchair and pain pills, he’d have to stay off his feet for a week, but soon enough he’d be back to normal. It was the most dramatic thing that had ever happened to him, and in the end nothing had come of it. Or almost nothing. When he asked if he’d be well enough to make it to the wedding, the doctor raised an eyebrow again and said, “Watch the video.”
He was home by dinner time, though of course he couldn’t eat. The painkillers kept him cloudy on the family room couch, where he watched a European soccer match he couldn’t follow, except to keep track of the score; it was one-all when he dozed off and no different when he woke half an hour later. He heard activity in the kitchen, plates clattering, Cynthia talking quietly, and then Joy, loud, “Will you lay off already? It’s not your fucking wedding.” Then more muttering from Cynthia, footsteps heading toward the basement door, and Joy’s voice again, even louder, “And unlike you, I’m not having more than one.”
Paul wasn’t aware of being brought up to bed, but that’s where he woke the next morning, just before dawn, birds clamoring in the branches of the neighbor’s oak. Were they always so loud? If so, he didn’t know how he’d ever managed to sleep past sunrise. A dream lingered just out of reach—something to do with water or light, and missing keys or a lock that wouldn’t work—but it had had enough of an erotic cast to leave him hard, all the way this time, skin pulling at his stitches. He needed another pain pill, but he didn’t want to wake Cynthia, whose face was turned away, her thick hair still so black that every errant white strand stood out as an absence, as if a tiny sliver of her head had disappeared in the night. If he thought he could have done so gently enough he would have reached out to stroke it, for his own comfort, because when the erection deserted him, along with the vague, dreamy desire that had propelled it, what arrived in its place was the naked chill of fear.
Today it was his abdominal muscles. And tomorrow? Next week, next year? What would give way then? His heart? Blood vessels in his brain?
How he’d fooled himself, to believe retirement was a new beginning, that his life was starting over again at sixty. But then, maybe he’d always been fooling himself. Didn’t life begin again every morning, when the birds raised this racket in the oak tree? If so, he’d slept through every new call to be reborn. He should have kept in mind all along: life began tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Until it didn’t.
Tomorrow the township might cut down the neighbor’s oak. Tomorrow Joy would wake up beside her new Persian husband, with his shining dark hair and gleaming white teeth. And if you believed the old stories, he might decide to behead her in favor of a new bride.
Yes, he needed the pill for sure. He eased his feet off the edge of the bed, and then his legs. As long as he propped himself on the nightstand, and then the wall, he didn’t think he’d have any trouble standing or walking. Up you go, he thought, and then he was doubled over on the floor, each pulse of pain making him moan. Behind him, Cynthia said, “For crying out loud, Paul. Can’t you just let me take care of you for once?” In the oak, the birds hollered and beat their wings.
All morning—or was it afternoon already?—people stopped in to visit. They hadn’t come to see him, of course. They were already in town for the wedding, and he happened to be an interesting side show, a way to kill an hour before heading to the hotel. First came Kyle, who walked in wearing rubber gloves and carrying a medical bag. He’d finished his residency a year ago and had been practicing at a private hospital for more than nine months, but still Paul couldn’t imagine anyone calling him Dr. Demsky. Nor could he see the little van dyke beard as anything more than a flimsy mask for his boyish face, a costume that hid nothing. “Most surgeons are lazy,” Kyle said, insisting on taking a look at the incision. “If I don’t know him, I don’t trust him.”
“Does everyone in the family have to see my balls?” Paul said, and before Kyle had covered him up, Reggie walked in, carrying a vase stuffed with greenery and dark branches, a few wispy white flowers at their tips.
“At least they didn’t cut it off,” Reggie said.
When Kyle went to hug her, she took a step back and put up her hands. “It’s nice to see you, sweetie, but you better take the gloves off first.”
Reggie’s face was tan for the first time in her life, as far as Paul knew, and her hair was longer than he’d seen it since they were kids. She had it pulled back tightly, so that her long nose was more prominent than usual, and it made her look so much like their mother that Paul wondered if she’d stopped looking in the mirror. When they were alone, she moved the vase from the nightstand to the dresser and fiddled with fern leaves, and only after she was quiet for ten seconds or so—a record for Reggie, he thought—did he realize she was crying. She covered her face, then ran to the bathroom, and when she came back she was flushed and smiling, proud of herself, it seemed, either for being overcome with emotion or for getting it back under control. “I was so scared when I heard,” she said. “We’re all we’ve got left.”
This was what happiness did to people, made them sentimental, delusional. She now talked about the past fondly, as if she’d appreciated it while it was here. She recalled stories about their parents Paul had forgotten or never known, at least one of which he was sure she’d made up: the time, to cheer up their depressed mother, their father put on her wedding gown and danced through the apartment to a Benny Goodman record, cigar clamped between molars. She talked about shops on Utica Avenue, the pool club where they’d spent summers splashing water into each other’s eyes, the shul where fifty years ago she and her boyfriend Larry might have dozed a few feet from each other during services.
“No wonder we understand each other so well,” Reggie said. “Why you’d marry someone from a totally different background—and an Arab?—I don’t get it at all.” She and Larry were driving out to the old neighborhood tomorrow, she said. She dreamed about those streets every night and wanted to see them again, even if they were full of Haitians now. And then they’d go out to the cemetery, the big family plot where dozens of Habermans were buried: grandparents, uncles and aunts, a cousin who’d died from polio at thirteen, another, at twenty-nine, from an unfortunate combination of vodka and sleeping pills. “I want to make sure they’re taking good care of Mom and Dad.”
“You should bring these,” Paul said, gesturing at the vase. She could look back all she wanted. But from now on, he decided, his sights were set firmly ahead. Tomorrow’s a new beginning, he wanted to tell her. And the day after that, and the day after that. Until, one day, it isn’t.
Later, after he slept again, Russell Demsky poked his head in and said, “This is what happens when you’re married to a ball-buster. Would’ve been me if I didn’t have the sense to cut loose.” Then he winked and added, “The first need of a free people is to define their own—”
Before he could finish, Paul coughed, then winced. “About the interest on your loan—”
“Feel better, champ,” Russell said, and left.
Only when the room darkened, the sunlight now partially blocked by the neighbor’s oak, did he admit to himself he’d been waiting all day for Joy. He had the feeling that he had important things to tell her, though with the pain medication fogging his thoughts again he couldn’t remember what those things were. Maybe she’d come to see him already, and he’d been sleeping. Or maybe he’d been awake but so groggy it had since slipped his mind. She couldn’t simply have forgotten him, could she, even on a day like this?
When he heard footsteps outside the door, he ran fingers through his hair and tried to sit up but couldn’t manage to wedge the pillow under his back. Then came a soft tapping on the doorframe. Not Joy. She would have knocked harder, or more likely just blown in without waiting to be invited. Here instead: obsidian hair, skin the color of wet sand, porcelain teeth. Aziz. He didn’t look like someone who was getting married in a few hours—or else he looked like someone who might always be getting married in a few hours, who, on a moment’s notice, could throw on a tuxedo and walk straight into the most important event of his life. He wore loose blue jeans and a V-neck shirt that showed off a surprisingly smooth chest, not a single hair in view. What was it about him that made Joy look so small under his arm, when he himself wasn’t more than a few inches taller than she, only an inch or two taller than Paul? To his credit, he was nothing like Russell Demsky: dainty, almost feminine, with long eyelashes and a dimple on his left cheek when he smiled and sat on the edge of the bed.
He was carrying something. Not a bucket with an eel inside, but a small rug, maybe two feet square, with a pattern of abstract shapes that resembled birds and others that resembled goats. Aziz held it up, and then his hand disappeared inside. Not a rug but a bag. Or a bag made of a rug. What came out of it was a flat black box, just bigger than his hand, with a split wire hanging from one side. “In Persian culture,” he said, “it’s traditional for the groom’s family to heap gifts on the bride and her people. My dad wants to stay on Russell’s good side. But I know you’re paying for everything. So, anyway, just a small token. Stuff for the gym. Cynthia said you’ve been going.” He held up the bag. “To carry your things.” Then he set the box on Paul’s chest. “And something to listen to on the treadmill.”
“I don’t think I’ll be on the treadmill for a while.”
“For relaxing in bed, then.”
At the ends of the wire were two little pads for his ears. Paul slipped them on, and Aziz pressed a button on the box. A compact disc player, yes, he could see that now, though he couldn’t shake the sense that Aziz was handing him occult objects, ancient, unidentifiable, possibly dangerous. He expected to hear more squeaks and groans, but when the music came through there were sounds he recognized: a violin, a piano, even a melody, though not a familiar one. He let his head sink down into the pillow. Aziz didn’t move from the edge of the bed. They’d stay this way until the music finished, he thought, or else the music would continue until he was finished, and Reggie, too, and Cynthia and Russell, and even Joy and Kyle. It sounded like a tune that had been here long before they’d arrived and would remain long after they’d gone. And it was carrying him somewhere with its extended simple lines, its gradual changes of pitch, somewhere beyond thought, where he could simply lie and listen.
But before he made it there—his eyes still open a crack, though blurred—Aziz was moving to the door, half turned away, smile faltering. When Paul slipped one of the earphones off, the tune in his head mixed with the sound of Joy shouting from below. “Z! Do you hear me? Come on, already. It’s time to go.”
“She’s losing it,” Aziz said quietly, without turning to face Paul, without knowing for sure, it seemed, that Paul could hear him. “Still four hours to the ceremony. It was her idea to wait for sundown. She’ll be sitting in that dress with her makeup done all afternoon.”
When Joy’s voice reached them again, it was from outside, in the driveway. “If you’re not down in five minutes, you can find your own way there.”
Paul wanted to know the name of the tune, but Aziz was already moving to the window. His hair was as luxuriously black as Cynthia’s, shoulder blades pushing out the back of his shirt like chicken wings. He didn’t look like anyone’s husband. Certainly not like a husband who’d behead his bride the morning after their wedding. Of course there were other old stories, too. Strange that he remembered them only now. One about a Persian king, for example, so devoted to his lovely Jewish wife that he spared her people from the gallows.
“On my way,” Aziz called down, but made no move to leave the room.
Paul pushed aside the sheet that covered him. He had only an undershirt on, nothing below. It was the least dignified outfit a man could wear, but for some reason he didn’t mind. He swung his legs off the bed, set his feet on the floor, and waited until he felt the strength to stand. And if it never came?
“Be right down,” Aziz called. He, too, seemed to be waiting, gathering strength or patience or nerve. When he saw Paul sitting, he came to him and helped him up. Together they shuffled to the window. In the driveway, Cynthia and Kyle carrie
d the cake box to the back of the Jeep while Joy watched, or rather, directed. “Keep it flat,” she said. “Bring your corner up.” She was in the same shorts and flip-flops and tank top as yesterday—had it only been yesterday?—but her hair was different. New bangs, the rest twisted and pinned to the sides of her head, so that curls fell over her cheeks and ears and left the taut skin of her neck exposed. The skin who knew how many men had touched, that Aziz had touched who knew how many times. The same skin Paul had seen when he’d surprised her in the bathroom—when, in that frozen moment before he’d closed the door, she’d hardly moved to cover herself, instead giving him the very look she’d turned on him at the rehearsal dinner, direct and unabashed, mouth open.
“Keep the end up, goddamnit,” she cried, out of sight now behind the Jeep’s open back door. “It’s already mangled enough.”
He knew now, what kind of look it was. Maybe he’d always known. One of understanding, of pity. One that recognized shame and longing and heartache.
“You’ll be stunning,” he called down. “Just remember to have fun tonight.” To Aziz, he said, “Your kids. They’ll be something to see.”
He hoped she’d come around the car and look up. Kyle did, and then Cynthia, who shaded her eyes with a hand and yelled, “Stay off your feet. And don’t even think about going downstairs. Gail, from Hadassah? She’s bringing food up later.” Her hair, too, was pinned up, and he wanted to experience a similar pang for the skin of her neck, though it was looser and ruddy. That he couldn’t was something for which he’d have to try to forgive himself. How could he long for what he already had? And without something to long for, what did it matter that tomorrow was a new beginning, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? “I’ll take extra pictures,” Cynthia said. “You won’t miss anything.”
Between You and Me Page 23